WASHINGTON (AP) — A divided Supreme Court on Friday ruled that individual judges lack the authority to grant nationwide injunctions, but the decision left unclear the fate of President Donald Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship.

The outcome was a victory for the Republican president, who has complained about individual judges throwing up obstacles to his agenda. He called it a “monumental victory.”

But a conservative majority left open the possibility that the birthright citizenship changes could remain blocked nationwide. Trump’s order would deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of people who are in the country illegally.

The cases now return to lower courts, where judges will have to decide how to tailor their orders to comply with the high court ruling, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion.

The justices agreed with the Trump administration, as well as President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration before it, that judges are overreaching by issuing orders that apply to everyone instead of just the parties before the court.

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the government to bypass the Constitution.” This is so, Sotomayor said, because the administration may be able to enforce a policy even when it has been challenged and found to be unconstitutional by a lower court.

Birthright citizenship automatically makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally. The right was enshrined soon after the Civil War in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

In a notable Supreme Court decision from 1898, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the court held that the only children who did not automatically receive U.S. citizenship upon being born on U.S. soil were the children of diplomats, who have allegiance to another government; enemies present in the U.S. during hostile occupation; those born on foreign ships; and those born to members of sovereign Native American tribes.

The U.S. is among about 30 countries where birthright citizenship — the principle of jus soli or “right of the soil” — is applied. Most are in the Americas, and Canada and Mexico are among them.

Trump and his supporters have argued that there should be tougher standards for becoming an American citizen, which he called “a priceless and profound gift” in the executive order he signed on his first day in office.

The Trump administration has asserted that children of noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, a phrase used in the amendment, and therefore are not entitled to citizenship.

But states, immigrants and rights groups that have sued to block the executive order have accused the administration of trying to unsettle the broader understanding of birthright citizenship that has been accepted since the amendment’s adoption.

Judges have uniformly ruled against the administration.

The Justice Department had argued that individual judges lack the power to give nationwide effect to their rulings.

The Trump administration instead wanted the justices to allow Trump’s plan to go into effect for everyone except the handful of people and groups that sued. Failing that, the administration argued that the plan could remain blocked for now in the 22 states that sued. New Hampshire is covered by a separate order that is not at issue in this case.

As a further fallback, the administration asked “at a minimum” to be allowed to make public announcements about how it plans to carry out the policy if it eventually is allowed to take effect.

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Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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The Supreme Court is busy dropping opinions as it careens toward the end of another tumultuous term. The justices have released 12 opinions so far this June, with 21 more coming before the term closes in early July.

Eight of the 12 opinions released so far have been unanimous, a surprising fact given how divided the Court is on many issues. The justices’ unanimity this term has extended to some contentious, high-profile cases: In Ames v. Ohio Dept. of Youth Services, the justices said that, yes, “reverse discrimination” does exist (Imani Gandy and I dug into the implications of that opinion on our podcast, Boom! Lawyered). And in Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, the Court unanimously found U.S. gun manufacturers not liable for Mexican drug cartel violence.

While it’s tempting to see all those unanimous rulings as a sign there’s more consensus among the justices than disagreement, I caution against that impulse. I expect the remaining blockbuster cases of this term—from those concerning birthright citizenship and defunding Planned Parenthood to trans rights and LGTBQ+ book bans, to name a few—to reveal a Court more divided than ever.

That’s a problem for Chief Justice John Roberts. Under his stewardship, the Supreme Court has gone off the rails with open partisanship and corruption scandals. And this isn’t just an issue court watchers have latched onto. Public trust in the Supreme Court has fallen to a record low: Just 35 percent of Americans say they approve of the Court, a 2024 Gallup poll found—a 24-point drop since 2020. Faith in the Supreme Court plummeted particularly after the justices inserted themselves into Americans’ reproductive lives by overturning Roe v. Wade in 2021. In his 20th year on the job, I see Roberts trying to maintain some semblance of control over this fractious Court and save some facade of the institution’s credibility before the term closes.

At least, that’s how I read the fact that Roberts authored last week’s unanimous ruling in A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, which stated that students with disabilities do not need to meet a higher standard of proof than plaintiffs in other types of disability discrimination cases. The opinion, which was straightforward and broke no new legal ground, could have been assigned to any of the justices. The fact that Roberts authored it suggests he wanted it to come from him as Chief, specifically.

Here’s a quick summary of the case.

A.J.T. v. Osseo involved a teenage girl in Minnesota, Ava Tharpe, whose rare form of epilepsy causes her to have extreme seizures. The seizures are so intense and so frequent, especially in the morning, that she can’t attend school before noon. When Tharpe’s family lived in Kentucky, her school accommodated her rare medical condition by shifting her schedule and offering evening tutoring so that Tharpe wouldn’t miss hours of instructions a day, according to NPR.

But when Tharpe’s family moved to Minnesota, the Osseo School District did not accommodate their request for the same accommodations she received at her Kentucky school. The Tharpes sued, but both the district court and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals held the family hadn’t shown that school officials acted with “bad faith or gross misjudgment.” That standard—bad faith or gross misjudgement—is higher than the bar plaintiffs in other kinds of disability discrimination cases must meet. According to the Eighth Circuit, it applies uniquely to education claims.

When the Supreme Court took up A.J.T. v. Osseo back in January 2025, it was meant to resolve the issue of whether that heightened standard in an educational context only should survive.

But during oral arguments in May 2025, the Osseo School District made an entirely different argument—a more radical one. The district, represented by the experienced Supreme Court litigator Lisa Blatt, argued that the heighted bad faith standard should apply to all disability discrimination cases, not just education access claims. This assertion came as news to the justices; the district made this case for the first time during oral arguments. That’s highly improper Supreme Court etiquette, but Blatt went barreling onward with the ferocity that has built her career. She advocated powerfully for the district that hired her—and against any future disability discrimination plaintiff in any context.

The justices were not pleased with Blatt’s pivot, which Justice Amy Coney Barrett said demanded a “pretty big sea change” in the law. After Blatt accused opposing counsel of lying about the school district’s position to the Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch snapped, “I think you should be more careful with your words.”

It was pretty spicy—and it became pretty clear the school district was going to lose.

That’s exactly what happened: On June 12, 2025, the Supreme Court unanimously sided with Tharpe’s family, rejecting outright the Eighth Circuit’s heightened standard for disability discrimination in education claims. The Court also refused Blatt’s exhortation to blanket-apply that standard to disability discrimination claims because that question was never properly before the Court.

“We will not entertain the District’s invitation to inject into this case significant issues that have not been fully presented,” Roberts wrote.

There, and in other parts of the ruling, the Chief Justice sounded terse, even annoyed. Perhaps he has the right to be. What Blatt and the district argued in A.J.T. v. Osseo was bananas, and her tone and approach during arguments were quite unprofessional. I don’t know if Blatt went into those arguments intending to YOLO her way into making disability discrimination much harder to prove, but the fact that she even tried suggests she thought it would be worthwhile advocacy. Her flouting of Court tradition came at no real cost to her career, other than a scolding by the Chief Justice. Roberts—and the Court—got this case exactly correct.

But here’s the rub: Blatt might be the only lawyer Roberts has scolded for staking out unsupported legal ground in the name of zealous advocacy. In fact, it’s his leadership as Chief Justice that has fostered a climate where the conservative legal movement feels empowered to make the most extreme arguments they can, with no professional consequence.

In 2022’s Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, conservative lawyers just invented some “facts” that Justice Neil Gorsuch then cited to justify allowing a public school football coach to hold prayer circles after games. It was so deceptive Justice Sonia Sotomayor included an illustration of the actual prayer circle at issue in the case in her dissent to show future courts that the opinion was purposefully untethered from reality to achieve a win for conservatives. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was supposed to focus narrowly on the constitutionality of Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban under Roe v. Wade. Instead, attorneys for Mississippi wound up asking the justices to overturn Roe entirely—and the conservative majority obliged in 2022.

Given all that, well, I need Justice Roberts to give me a break with his disappointed-dad tone toward Blatt and the district in A.J.T.

We can clearly see the results of Roberts’ lax attitude toward precedent and ethics in other big cases from this term. In the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. CASA, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is manipulating a fight over nationwide injunctions to try and rewrite by fiat the 14th Amendment. That’s the amendment that grants U.S. citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.”

That case is about whether federal judges have the power to issue injunctions blocking Trump’s executive orders nationwide—that is, beyond their district. If the Supreme Court rules against nationwide injunctions, it would allow Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order to take effect while litigation challenging it continues in the lower courts. In other words, the Supreme Court would have rewritten the 14th Amendment by blessing a presidential order that directly conflicts with it.

Those kinds of possibilities were unimaginable before John Roberts became Chief Justice. Now overturning precedent—either directly or indirectly via the shadow docket—has become expected.

The Court will issue opinions in some of this term’s remaining cases on June 18, 2025.