Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on SCOTUSblog, which was acquired by The Dispatch in April. To get all of SCOTUSblog’s coverage of the Supreme Court term, be sure to sign up here.
The Supreme Court closed out its 2023-24 term by handing then-candidate Donald Trump a major victory, holding that former presidents have at least presumptive immunity for their official acts. That ruling arguably helped clear the way for Trump’s return to power in January 2025 and, in turn, his outsized role in the Supreme Court’s 2024-25 term.
On the last day before the court’s summer recess, the justices handed the Trump administration another major victory with their ruling that federal district judges do not have the power to issue orders that block laws or policies throughout the United States. But even before that, one of the major stories of the term was the unprecedented frequency with which the Trump administration came to the court on the emergency docket—and the success that it generally found there.
It was no surprise that challenges to President Donald Trump’s January 2025 order ending birthright citizenship—the guarantee of citizenship to virtually everyone born in the United States—made their way to the Supreme Court quickly. One of the judges that had barred the Trump administration from enforcing the order, Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, who was appointed to the bench by former President Ronald Reagan, called the order “blatantly unconstitutional.”
But when the Trump administration came to the justices in March, asking them to partially block orders by Coughenour and two other federal judges prohibiting the government from implementing the birthright citizenship order, it focused not on the order’s legality, but instead on the judges’ use of “universal” or “nationwide” injunctions—that is, the courts’ power to bar the Trump administration from enforcing the birthright citizenship order anywhere in the United States.
Universal injunctions had long been a thorn in the sides of both Democratic and Republican administrations. Their detractors alleged that they allowed plaintiffs—often by going to a district court where they believed they could obtain a favorable outcome—to block the administration from implementing a law or policy nationwide. Indeed, not long before she left office, Elizabeth Prelogar, the solicitor general during the Biden administration, suggested in an emergency appeal that the justices should address the propriety of universal injunctions—a suggestion that the court declined in that case.
Just a few months later, however, the court agreed to the Trump administration’s plea to weigh in on universal injunctions, fast-tracking the case for a rare May argument and a decision less than six weeks later. In a 6-3 decision by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court ruled that federal district judges lack the power to issue universal injunctions.
Although the June 27 decision generally foreclosed universal injunctions, it did not address the legality of Trump’s birthright citizenship order at all, and it thus left the door open for broad challenges to the president’s order, either because a “blanket ban on the enforcement of the Executive Order” may ultimately be necessary to provide relief to the states contesting the order or through class actions, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated in her 44-page dissent. And before the day was over, immigrants’ rights groups had taken the latter step, filing a class action on behalf of babies whose citizenship status would be affected by the order, seeking to invalidate it.
The universal injunction issue came to the Supreme Court on its emergency (sometimes colloquially known as the “shadow”) docket, in which the justices often act quickly, without additional briefing or oral arguments. The three applications for emergency relief in the birthright citizenship case were likely the highest-profile requests by the Trump administration, but during the first five months after Trump’s inauguration the federal government filed 17 other requests for emergency relief—more than twice as many as were filed during the 16 years of the George W. Bush administration and the Obama administration combined.
The frenetic pace at which the court fielded such requests led to a sense that, even as the number of cases that the justices decided on the merits continued to hover far below their historical average, the justices were nonetheless extremely busy behind the scenes.
To be sure, not all of the Trump administration’s pleas for emergency relief (nor its efforts to stave off requests made by others) were successful. In April, for example, the court rejected the Trump administration’s application to pause a ruling by a federal judge in Maryland that directed the government to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration admitted was erroneously removed to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. Instead, the court agreed that the judge could require the government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release and return him to the United States.
Also in April, the court issued a dramatic middle-of-the-night order that temporarily barred the Trump administration from removing a group of Venezuelan men currently in immigration custody under an 18th-century law, the Alien Enemies Act. Pointing to Abrego Garcia’s case, lawyers for the men told the justices that emergency relief was necessary precisely because the government insisted that it did not need to return immigrants once they had been removed from the U.S.—even if it had done so mistakenly.
But the Trump administration nonetheless found substantial success elsewhere on the emergency appeals docket. In a pair of orders that received far less attention than the appeals involving the Alien Enemies Act but could have an even more widespread impact, a majority of the court cleared the way for the Trump administration to advance other parts of its agenda on immigration. In a ruling on May 19, the court allowed the government to end the protected status of more than 300,000 Venezuelan nationals living in the United States. Less than two weeks later, the court issued a similar order allowing the government to revoke the permission to stay granted by the Biden administration for more than 500,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan nationals in this country. Then, on June 23, the court—divided along ideological lines—paused a district court order that temporarily barred the government from sending immigrants to countries that were not specifically identified in their removal orders.
The court similarly greenlighted Trump’s efforts to remake the federal government and its workforce. For example, in May, the court—once again divided along ideological lines—allowed the Trump administration to remove the heads of two federal agencies, the Merits Systems Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board, who contended that under federal law, they could only be fired for good cause. In April, the justices blocked an order by a federal judge in San Francisco that would have required the government to reinstate more than 16,000 federal workers who had been laid off by six agencies earlier in the year.
The court’s three Democratic appointees also dissented from the court’s order in early May allowing the administration to enforce a Department of Defense policy barring transgender people from serving in the U.S. military. The Trump administration argued that the policy of allowing transgender people to serve was “contrary to military readiness and the Nation’s interest,” while the service members challenging the ban countered that if the policy went into effect, the government could begin discharging transgender service members immediately.
The court’s other high-profile rulings during the 2024-25 term were solid victories for the court’s conservative majority. In United States v. Skrmetti, the justices upheld Tennessee’s ban on the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors (and, by extension, similar laws in more than half the states). By a vote of 6-3, the majority rejected the argument, made by the challengers and the Biden administration, that the law draws distinctions based on sex, because, for example, a transgender boy cannot receive medicines that a teenage boy who is not transgender is allowed to receive. Instead, Chief Justice John Roberts reasoned, the law prohibits the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy based on the patient’s age and the medical purpose for which they will be used.
In a dissent that she read from the bench, and which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor countered that the court’s ruling “authorizes, without second thought, untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them.”
Just over a week later, in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the same 6-3 majority ruled that parents in a Washington, D.C., suburb have a right to opt their children out of instruction that includes LGBTQ+ themes. In a decision by Justice Samuel Alito, the court ruled that the refusal by the Montgomery County, Maryland, school board to provide them with that option violates their constitutional right to freely exercise their religion because it “substantially interferes with the religious development of their children.”
Sotomayor again dissented from the bench, cautioning that the ruling “threatens the very essence of public education” because it “strikes at the core premise of public schools: that children may come together to learn not the teachings of a particular faith, but a range of concepts and views that reflect our entire society.”
In Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, the justices did not reach a decision on a Catholic virtual charter school’s bid to become the country’s first religious charter school. The dispute pitted the state’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, who opposed the creation of the charter school, against the state’s charter school board, which had approved the school’s application. With Barrett not participating in the case (presumably because of the involvement of students and professors at Notre Dame’s law school, where she taught before becoming a federal judge), the justices deadlocked 4-4, leaving the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision in favor of Drummond in place. But the issue is likely to return to the court again soon—in a case in which Barrett will likely be able to vote.
Barrett’s role on the court drew particular attention this year, with a story in the New York Times suggesting that conservatives were concerned that the Trump appointee was “showing signs of leftward drift.” But by the end of the term, Barrett may have silenced those critics. In Skrmetti, she not only joined Roberts’ opinion for the court but also authored a separate concurring opinion, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, in which she indicated that she would have gone further and ruled that transgender people are not a “suspect class”—that is, people who have historically been subject to discrimination. Barrett also was the author of the court’s ruling on universal injunctions—an assignment that would have come from the chief justice. After that decision, Trump praised Barrett, saying at a news conference that he had “great respect for her” and that “her decision was brilliantly written.”
The court’s docket for the 2025-26 term already includes a few potential blockbusters. On June 30, the justices agreed to revisit their 2001 ruling that upheld limits on coordinated campaign expenditures, which restrict political parties from spending money on campaign advertising with input from political candidates. They will also take up a challenge to Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy”—the effort to “convert” someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity—and hear arguments again in a dispute over Louisiana’s congressional map.
But still more fireworks could come on both the emergency docket and the merits docket, as challenges to the president’s efforts to implement his agenda bubble up to the Supreme Court. The justices could weigh in soon on the legality of the president’s order ending birthright citizenship, as well as his authority to invoke emergency powers to impose tariffs on imported goods. In those cases and others like them, journalists and scholars following the court will be looking not only at the result that the court reaches, but also at what the rulings mean for presidential power more broadly.
