California Gov. Gavin Newsom today sued Fox News for defamation for $787 million, alleging that anchor Jesse Watters and reporter John Roberts “willfully distorted the facts” about the timeline of phone calls between Trump and Newsom this month.

The dispute centers around protests by Californians against mass deportations in the Los Angeles area. Trump activated the state’s National Guard and sent Marines to the state to quash the protests. Newsom agreed that the two spoke over the phone on June 6, before the president sent the military into Los Angeles.

On June 10, Trump said that he had spoken to Newsom “a day ago,” according to Newsom’s lawsuit, a phone call that Newsom says never took place. Roberts and Watters each reported on Trump’s remarks, with Watters’ program using the chyron “Gavin lied about Trump’s call.”

“Rather than leave the matter alone, or simply provide the facts, Fox News chose to defame Governor Newsom, branding him a liar,” the lawsuit says. “Recognizing that President Trump was not correct, yet wanting to curry favor with the President, Fox News willfully distorted the facts.”

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Our own Ed Kilgore writes that “it is very clear that in this and other cases, the Supreme Court has enhanced its own power and Trump’s, as well, at the expense of lower-court judges and the aggrieved parties that rely on the judiciary to slow down the runaway freight train of the 47th presidency”:

The decision did not address the constitutionality of the administration’s demand for an end to birthright citizenship, the principle that anyone born is this country is entitled automatically to U.S. citizenship. Instead, the Court focused on the real goal of Trump’s lawyers in pushing this case: to rein in the many federal district court judges around the country who are trying to slow down the administration’s efforts to expand presidential authority, in cases ranging from deportations without hearings to mass firings of federal employees to usurpation of congressional spending authority. (Indeed, Barrett’s opinion noted that 25 nationwide injunctions were issued by district court judges in the first 100 days of the Trump administration.) This has often been a footrace between the administration and the judges, with the Supreme Court being the ultimate destination of an extraordinary number of legal disputes. Now the Court has given Team Trump a big advantage: Parties seeking judicial relief from executive-branch overreach will have to plod through multiple district courts or undertake the complicated process of putting together class-action suits. Many legal observers who might generally agree that individual judges have on occasion overreached their authority will be alarmed by the timing and practical implications of the decision, which is a precious gift to Trump’s lawyers.

But rather than viewing this as an emergency brought on by Trump’s power grabs, Barrett chose to view the situation as the result of a long, slow, and largely unwarranted expansion of the power of judges to issue injunctions, which the Supreme Court is finally and appropriately addressing. That it happened to benefit the power-hungry president who placed her on the Court was incidental.

What is birthright citizenship and what happens after the Supreme Court ruling?

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After the Supreme Court issued a ruling that limits the ability of federal judges to issue universal injunctions — but didn’t rule on the legality of President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship — immigrant rights groups are trying a new tactic by filing a national class action lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two immigrant rights organizations whose members include people without legal status in the U.S. who “have had or will have children born in the United States after February 19, 2025,” according to court documents.

One of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, William Powell, senior counsel at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, says his colleagues at CASA, Inc. and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project think that, with the class action approach “we will be able to get complete relief for everyone who would be covered by the executive order.”

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The strategic shift required three court filings: one to add class allegations to the initial complaint; a second to move for class certification; and a third asking a district court in Maryland to issue “a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction asking for relief for that putative class,” Powell said.

In the amended complaint, filed two hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the immigrant rights attorneys said that Trump’s effort to ban birthright citizenship, if allowed to stand, “would throw into doubt the citizenship status of thousands of children across the country.”

“The Executive Order threatens these newborns’ identity as United States citizens and interferes with their enjoyment of the full privileges, rights, and benefits that come with U.S. citizenship, including calling into question their ability to remain in their country of birth,” reads the complaint.

Rights groups and 22 states had asked federal judges to block President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. Issued on his first day in office, the executive order states, “the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

But after three federal district court judges separately blocked Trump’s order, issuing universal injunctions preventing its enforcement nationwide, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to block universal injunctions altogether.

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The Supreme Court did not rule on the birthright issue itself. But after the ruling, Trump called it a “monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law,” in a briefing at the White House.

The president said the ruling means his administration can now move forward with his efforts to fundamentally reshape longstanding U.S. policy on immigration and citizenship.

Friday’s ruling quickly sparked questions about how the dispute over birthright citizenship will play out now — and how the ruling on universal injunctions might affect other efforts to push back on executive policies, under President Trump and future presidents.

“Nationwide injunctions have been an important tool to prevent blatantly illegal and unconstitutional conduct,” the National Immigrant Justice Center’s director of litigation, Keren Zwick, said in a statement sent to NPR. The decision to limit such injunctions, she said, “opens a pathway for the president to break the law at will.”

Both Zwick and Powell emphasized that the Supreme Court did not rule on a key question: whether Trump’s executive order is legal.

At the White House, Attorney General Pam Bondi would not answer questions about how the order might be implemented and enforced.

“This is all pending litigation,” she said, adding that she expects the Supreme Court to take up the issue this fall.

“We’re obviously disappointed with the result on nationwide injunctions,” Powell said. But, he added, he believes the Supreme Court will ultimately quash Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship.

“The executive order flagrantly violates the 14th Amendment citizenship clause and Section 1401a of the Immigration and Nationality Act,” Powell said, “both of which guarantee birthright citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States, with only narrow exceptions for ambassadors [and] invading armies.”

The court’s ruling set a 30-day timeframe for the policy laid out in Trump’s executive order to take effect.

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“The Government here is likely to suffer irreparable harm from the District Courts’ entry of injunctions that likely exceed the authority conferred by the Judiciary Act,” a syllabus, or headnote, of the Supreme Court’s ruling states.

The majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, also discusses the differences between “complete relief ” and “universal relief.”

“Here, prohibiting enforcement of the Executive Order against the child of an individual pregnant plaintiff will give that plaintiff complete relief: Her child will not be denied citizenship,” Barrett wrote. “Extending the injunction to cover all other similarly situated individuals would not render her relief any more complete.”

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the ruling suggests that constitutional guarantees might not apply to anyone who isn’t a party to a lawsuit.

The concept of birthright citizenship has deep roots, dating to the English common law notion of jus soli (“right of the soil”). The doctrine was upended for a time in the U.S. by the Supreme Court’s notorious Dred Scott ruling.

Current legal standing for birthright citizenship in the U.S. extends back to the 1860s, when the 14th Amendment of the Constitution was ratified, stating, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

“Any executive order purporting to limit birthright citizenship is just as unconstitutional today as it was yesterday,” Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, told NPR.

“There is nothing substantively in the decision that undercuts those lower court opinions. The opinion just undercuts the tools available to the courts to enforce that constitutional mandate.”

The Supreme Court on Friday backed President Donald Trump’s request to scale back lower-court orders that have for months blocked the administration’s ban on automatic citizenship for the U.S.-born babies of undocumented immigrants and foreign visitors, ruling that those nationwide injunctions went too far. The 6-3 decision, with the liberal justices dissenting, largely strips federal judges of a powerful tool they have used to temporarily halt many of Trump’s policies nationwide while litigation is pending. It will reshape the early stages of the judicial process when it comes to challenging executive action.

The ruling did not address the constitutionality of the president’s ban on birthright citizenship, which is a signature part of his immigration crackdown. The United States has long granted automatic citizenship to babies born in the United States when neither parent is a citizen or a permanent legal resident. Opponents of Trump’s ban say it conflicts with the 14th Amendment, past court rulings and the nation’s history.

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The justices kept Trump’s ban on hold for at least 30 days and sent a set of cases back to the lower courts to determine the practical implications of their ruling. They left open a path for challengers to try to continue to block the president’s policy nationwide through class-action lawsuits but also raised the possibility that birthright citizenship could be cut off in the 28 states that have not joined lawsuits against it. (Read the ruling and dissents here.)

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said nationwide injunctions probably exceed the power that Congress has granted to the federal courts. Judges, she said, must limit the relief they grant to the individuals and organizations who file lawsuits, in this case the states and pregnant noncitizens who challenged the policy.

“Some say that the universal injunction ‘give[s] the Judiciary a powerful tool to check the Executive Branch,’” Barrett wrote. “But federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

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For 20 minutes inside the courtroom, Justice Sonia Sotomayor read a summary of her dissent to emphasize strong disagreement with the opinion, which she called a “travesty of law” and warned would “cause chaos for the families of all affected children.” The high court’s conservative majority, she said, had ignored the unlawfulness of Trump’s citizenship ban and instead declared the president “generally free to enforce unquestionably unconstitutional policies against everyone except those who file suit.”

“That the court uses this case of all cases to review the question of universal injunctions is shameful,” said Sotomayor, who was joined in her written dissent by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “If there was ever a case where a universal injunction is appropriate, it is this one under every historical precedent.”

The ruling was one of five issued Friday, the final day of the Supreme Court term, and has implications for other cases in which judges have blocked the administration’s initiatives nationwide.

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In a news conference, Trump celebrated the decision, saying, “We can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis.”

Trump said that in addition to birthright citizenship, the administration will seek to reopen cases that have limited his policies on ending funding to “sanctuary cities,” which limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement efforts; suspending refugee resettlement; freezing “unnecessary” funding; and preventing federal money from being used for surgeries for transgender people.

“We have so many of them,” Trump said. “I have a whole list.”

Skye Perryman, president of the advocacy group Democracy Forward, said that the ruling was disappointing but that its effect would not be nearly as sweeping as Trump suggested.

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“There is a nuance and a narrow scope that the White House just ignored,” said Perryman, whose group has filed a number of lawsuits against the administration.

Conservative commentator Ed Whelan also said in his newsletter Friday that “at least in the short term, the ruling is probably going to accomplish much less than many people celebrating it realize.”

Twenty-two Democratic-led states, immigrant advocacy groups and pregnant women challenged Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship in federal courts in Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington state. Those cases will return to the judges who issued the injunctions. They must reconsider, in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, whether the states meet the justices’ new standard for obtaining broad relief.

The Supreme Court’s decision acknowledged, for instance, an argument from states challenging the ban, which says the harm it would create can be fixed only with a blanket order that applies nationwide — in part because children move across state lines or are born outside their parents’ state of residence.

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The majority left it to the lower courts to evaluate the states’ assertions and said the judges “should determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate.”

In a statement, Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D) said the court’s ruling means “families across our country must continue to live with uncertainty about whether their children — born on U.S. soil — will be recognized as American citizens.”

But, he said, the decision leaves open the possibility of a new, far-reaching court order that Maryland and other challengers say is necessary to address the president’s ban.

“This un-American executive order still will not go into effect immediately,” Brown said. “This fight is not over. We will continue to challenge this unlawful order — because justice demands it.”

Legal experts predicted a surge of new litigation. Friday’s ruling allows judges to halt policies nationwide if, for instance, they are doing so in response to class-action lawsuits filed on behalf of groups of similarly situated people. The decision does not address whether courts separately can invalidate other types of federal agency action nationwide through the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires extensive notice and comment when agencies implement new rules.

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Hours after the Supreme Court ruling was announced, the advocacy group CASA and other organizations that had obtained a nationwide injunction rushed to a federal judge in Maryland with an amended lawsuit, seeking class-action status for every pregnant person or child born to families without permanent legal status, no matter where they live.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations separately filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit in federal court in New Hampshire on behalf of babies born in the U.S. who would be denied citizenship under Trump’s order.

If any of those efforts are successful, the issue could quickly rebound to the Supreme Court.

While Friday’s decision effectively strips district courts of authority to grant nationwide injunctions, it appears to give the justices an even bigger role in fielding requests for broad relief from presidential orders while litigation is underway.

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Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said that is the proper role for the high court — to resolve major legal questions of national importance and ensure uniformity.

“Some might argue that preliminary disputes over the legality of major new statutes and executive actions can draw this Court into difficult or controversial matters earlier than we might like, as distinct from what happens on our slower-moving merits docket. That is an understandable concern,” he wrote in a concurring opinion. “But when it comes to the interim status of major new federal statutes and executive actions, it is often important for reasons of clarity, stability, and uniformity that this Court be the decider.”

Presidents in both parties, members of Congress and several Supreme Court justices have long decried nationwide injunctions for giving outsize power to individual judges to halt a president’s agenda. The broad orders temporarily block a policy or regulation while litigation is underway if a judge thinks that the action may be unconstitutional or that implementing it would cause immediate harm. During the Biden administration, nationwide injunctions halted vaccine mandates, stimulus programs for farmers of color, and immigration policies.

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On Friday, Republican lawmakers celebrated the court’s ruling, calling it a significant step toward addressing a bipartisan problem.

“Universal injunctions are an unconstitutional affront to our nation’s system of checks and balances, and ought to be stopped for good,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has now affirmed that federal courts are overstepping in their use of universal injunctions, and the Department of Justice has a right to forcefully challenge such overreach.”

The ban is just one of the Trump administration’s initiatives to dramatically restrict illegal and legal immigration. Trump has barred the entry of travelers to the United States from more than a dozen countries and has taken steps to fast-track deportations of alleged gang members from Venezuela, suspend refugee admissions and remove legal protections for more than 530,000 migrants.

On his first day back in the White House, Trump signed an executive order to end automatic citizenship for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and foreign workers and visitors.

The 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, established citizenship for freed Black Americans as well as “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The citizenship clause reversed the Supreme Court’s infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had denied citizenship to Black Americans.

Trump and his allies say they can ban birthright citizenship because unauthorized immigrants are in the country without permanent legal status and, therefore, are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. government.

But most legal scholars, as well as the Democratic-led states and immigrant rights groups challenging the policy, say Trump’s argument would require a reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment — and conflicts with settled Supreme Court precedent that protects citizenship for most everyone born on U.S. soil, except the children of foreign diplomats.

The Supreme Court upheld the guarantee of birthright citizenship in 1898, when it ruled that Wong Kim Ark, a child born in San Francisco, was a citizen even if his immigrant parents were “subjects of the Emperor of China.”

OPINION ANALYSIS

The Supreme Court on Friday granted the Trump administration’s request to partially pause rulings by three federal judges that had blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship – that is, the guarantee of citizenship to virtually anyone born in the United States. By a vote of 6-3, the justices repudiated the concept of universal or nationwide injunctions, which prohibit the government from enforcing a law or policy anywhere in the country. The justices did not, however, weigh in on the question at the center of the three lawsuits before the court: whether the birthright citizenship order itself is constitutional.

The Trump administration will also likely continue to be barred from enforcing the order – which will not go into effect for 30 days – against the individual pregnant plaintiffs who had challenged it. But the court’s opinion, by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, left open the prospect of additional litigation in the lower courts about how much more the injunctions should be narrowed, as well as the possibility of class action litigation to challenge the order on behalf of groups of plaintiffs who were not part of the litigation before the court but would be affected by the order.

Barrett acknowledged arguments that “the universal injunction ‘give[s] the Judiciary a powerful tool to check the Executive Branch.’ But federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them,” she emphasized. “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, in an opinion that she read from the bench – a signal of her strong disagreement with the majority’s ruling. She stated that the majority had ruled that, “absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit.”

Trump issued the executive order ending birthright citizenship on Jan. 20, shortly after he was sworn into office for his second term. Beginning in 30 days, the order provided, babies born in the United States would not be automatically entitled to citizenship if their parents were in the U.S. either illegally or temporarily.

Trump’s order spawned multiple challenges in federal courts around the country, including in Washington, Maryland, and Massachusetts. The challengers contended that the order violates the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1868 to overrule one of the Supreme Court’s most infamous decisions, its 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford. In that case, the Supreme Court – by a vote of 7-2 – ruled that a Black person whose ancestors had been brought to this country and sold as enslaved persons was not entitled to any protection from the federal courts because he was not a U.S. citizen.

In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Wong Kim Ark, who was born in California to parents of Chinese descent. By a vote of 6-2, the court rejected the government’s argument that Wong was not a U.S. citizen, with Justice Horace Gray explaining that the 14th Amendment – although enacted to establish the citizenship of Black people – “affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens.”

Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee, agreed with one group of challengers – the states of Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon – that the executive order was “blatantly unconstitutional,” and he temporarily blocked the Trump administration from enforcing the order anywhere in the country. Two other judges – U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman in Maryland and U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Massachusetts – issued similar orders.

In March, then-Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to strictly limit the scope of the orders issued by the three judges. She contended that the kind of nationwide injunctions issued in these cases “transgress constitutional limits on courts’ powers” and “compromise the Executive Branch’s ability to carry out its functions.” The Supreme Court, she said, “should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched.”

The challengers – which also include a second group of states, immigrants’ rights groups, and several pregnant women – urged the justices to leave the orders in place. “Being directed to follow the law as it has been universally understood for over 125 years is not an emergency warranting the extraordinary remedy of a stay,” Washington Solicitor General Noah Purcell wrote – particularly when, as the brief filed by a group of states and local governments, led by New Jersey, added, the Trump administration has not challenged the district courts’ conclusion that the executive order is likely unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court announced on April 17 that it would hear arguments in the dispute on May 15, just over two weeks after its regular argument schedule for the 2024-25 term had ended.

In her 26-page opinion for the majority, Barrett stressed that courts would have the power to issue universal injunctions only if courts had provided similar remedies in early English and U.S. history. But there is no such history, Barrett concluded. Indeed, she noted, “universal injunctions were not a feature of federal-court litigation until sometime in the 20th century,” and they “remained rare until the turn of the 21st century.”

Barrett also pushed back against the suggestion that the district courts issued the universal injunctions in this case to provide the challengers with complete relief. Although the principle of complete relief is an important one, she recognized, it is a “narrower concept” than a universal injunction, and it focuses on the idea of providing “complete relief between the parties” in a particular case.

In this case, Barrett wrote, “prohibiting enforcement of the Executive Order against the child of an individual pregnant plaintiff will give that plaintiff complete relief: Her child will not be denied citizenship. Extending the injunction to cover all other similarly situated individuals would not render her relief any more complete.”

The court did not decide whether the district courts’ injunctions should be narrower for the states challenging the executive order, and instead left it to the “lower courts [to] determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate.” The states had argued, Barrett noted, that a universal injunction was necessary to give the states complete relief because of, for example, the likelihood that residents will move from one state to another or be born in a different state from their parents’ residence. Otherwise, the states contended, they would have to “track and verify the immigration status of the parents of every child, along with the birth State of every child for whom they provide certain federally funded benefits” that are contingent on U.S. citizenship.

Justice Clarence Thomas, long a critic of nationwide injunctions, filed a concurring opinion that was joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. He agreed with the majority’s conclusion that federal judges lack the power to issue such injunctions. And he emphasized that although courts can generally provide complete relief between the parties, courts can only do so within the limits that they have traditionally observed – which may mean that “a court cannot award complete relief.”

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion that Thomas joined. He noted that the court had not ruled on what he characterized as the “weighty issue” of whether the states have a legal right to bring a lawsuit to assert claims on behalf of their residents. He also added that Friday’s ruling “will have very little value” if district courts do not adhere strictly to the federal rules governing when class actions can go forward. “Lax enforcement of the requirements for third-party standing and class certification would create a potentially significant loophole to today’s decision,” Alito concluded.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh also wrote a concurring opinion in which he stressed that although this case focuses on a district judge’s power to block federal laws or executive actions, the courts of appeals and the Supreme Court will inevitably weigh in on district court decisions granting or denying requests for preliminary injunctions, in whatever form they might take after Friday’s ruling. And in particular, he wrote, when the Supreme Court is asked to intervene, “this Court should not and cannot hide in the tall grass. When we receive such an application, we must grant or deny” – and the court’s decision, he added, “will often” serve as “guidance throughout the United States” until the issue is finally resolved.

Sotomayor’s dissent noted that every court that has reviewed Trump’s executive order “has deemed it patently unconstitutional.” And that “patent unlawfulness,” she argued, shows why universal injunctions should be available in a case like this one. “By stripping all federal courts, including itself, of” the power to grant universal relief, she wrote, “the Court kneecaps the Judiciary’s authority to stop the Executive from enforcing even the most unconstitutional policies.”

Sotomayor also detailed what she saw as the practical effects of the court’s ruling, writing that “newborns subject to the Citizenship Order will face the gravest harms imaginable.” “Affected children,” she warned, “also risk losing the chance to participate in American society altogether, unless their parents have sufficient resources to file individual suits or successfully challenge the Citizenship Order in removal proceedings.”

Sotomayor emphasized that class actions remain available as a tool to “provide broad relief to individuals subject to lawless Government conduct.” And she observed that “the parents of children covered by the Citizenship Order would be well advised to file promptly class-action suits and to request temporary injunctive relief” until a class is certified.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson filed a separate dissent in which she contended that the majority’s “decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.” She criticized the majority’s focus on whether universal injunctions were available as a remedy in early U.S. or English history, calling it a “smokescreen” that “obscures a far more basic question of enormous legal and practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?”

Barrett responded to Jackson’s dissent with sharp words, writing that Jackson “chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to” the sources on which Sotomayor’s dissent focuses “nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever.” Dismissing Jackson’s argument as “at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Barrett concluded by “observ[ing] only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”