A federal judge agreed Thursday to issue a new nationwide block against President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship.
The ruling from US District Judge Joseph Laplante is significant because the Supreme Court last month curbed the power of lower court judges to issue nationwide injunctions, while keeping intact the ability of plaintiffs to seek a widespread block of the order through class action lawsuits, which is what happened Thursday in New Hampshire.
Ruling from the bench, Laplante granted a request from immigration rights attorneys to certify a nationwide class that “will be comprised only of those deprived of citizenship” and issued a preliminary injunction indefinitely blocking Trump’s Day One order from being enforced against born and unborn babies who would be impacted by the policy.
They ruled that lower court judges only have authority to implement damages/relief for the people directly involved in the cases before them. So a single person challenging a law can only get relief for themselves, and a lower court judge cannot grant relief to the entire country.
This is a judge certifying the legal claims of a class, allowing a class action suit to grant relief to that entire class. In this case, the judge allowed the class to be defined as all people in the US who have been denied citizenship. The next step will be the government challenging the status of the class. The final step will be one of these cases coming directly before the Supreme Court to rule on the law itself instead of ruling on the process of the challenge to the law.