The Supreme Court opens the doors to hell with its ‘birthright’ ruling

If you thought there was executive order-induced chaos in the United States before today, gird your loins, it’s about to get worse.

In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday morning in favor of the Trump administration’s desire to bar implementation of a federal judge’s national injunction against the president’s birthright citizenship executive order — effectively saying that any legal challenges will need to be brought and considered on a case-by-case basis.

To be clear, this isn’t a decision on whether birthright citizenship should be denied to people as outlined in President Donald Trump’s executive order; rather, it is a decision on whether federal judges can block implementation uniformly across the nation. As such, the effect of the ruling will extend well beyond just birthright citizenship.

Because in his second term, Trump has used executive orders to implement most of his policies — bypassing legislative approval — the decision will likely be applied to other actions that have been stayed by federal judges.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor makes that clear, writing: “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates. Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies …”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was even more blunt about the stakes in her own dissent: “The Court’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.”

Even U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi admitted the intent of the case set before the Supreme Court, by tweeting: “Today, the Supreme Court instructed district courts to STOP the endless barrage of nationwide injunctions against President Trump.”

Choosing to make people stateless is a dangerous and immoral choice.

Still, we cannot sidestep the issue of birthright citizenship itself when considering the specifics of this ruling — especially given that during a news briefing after the ruling, Bondi reiterated her confidence that Friday’s ruling foreshadows a Trump administration win on the underlying constitutionality of birthright citizenship.

The executive order at the heart of this specifies that citizenship would not automatically extend to persons born to a mother who, at the time of birth, is unlawfully present and whose father isn’t a citizen or a green-card holder. It would also preclude citizenship for a person whose mother is here legally on a visa waiver, or a student, work, or tourist visa, at the time of birth, and whose father is neither a citizen nor a green-card holder.

In essence, the U.S. government proposes to put an asterisk on the 14th Amendment and make infants born in the U.S. under the circumstances it has outlined stateless.

As Global Voices — which writes extensively about the 15 million people across the globe who are stateless — makes clear, the repercussions of being left in this kind of legal limbo are long term. Being stateless can limit people’s “ability to get a job, go to school, seek medical assistance, access state resources or financial institutions, get married, and travel freely, among other things.”

Choosing to make people stateless is a dangerous and immoral choice, one that creates a permanent underclass willfully set up to be exploited and unprotected. And like all other willfully constructed hellscapes created by repressive authoritarians, deprivation of nationality wouldn’t stop with the children of those here on tourist visas or with irregular immigration statuses.

Denationalization would evolve into a convenient — and, as of Friday morning, federally incontestable — way to punish political opponents and strip obstreperous citizens of their rights, as has happened already in places like Nicaragua and Belarus.

That repressive trajectory brings us back, once more, to Friday’s court ruling, and the weight of what it means. If “plainly unlawful policies” and “existential threats to the rule of law” cannot be stopped and contested by injunctions applied nationwide, we have invited the creation of zones of lawlessness where some municipalities accord constitutionally guaranteed citizenship, while others opt to adhere to the current administration’s whims.

The conservative majority’s decision stipulates that the Trump administration’s executive order won’t take effect until 30 days from Friday. That may not be enough time for the expected multiple class-action lawsuits to be filed across the nation, but plenty of time for the chaos of attempted implementation to ensue.

I don’t know what circle of hell we’ve entered today with this ruling, but we all know who’s running the show.