New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin, one of the plaintiffs in a 22-state lawsuit against President Trump’s executive order curbing birthright citizenship, said Saturday he was “confident” the order could still be blocked nationwide following a Friday Supreme Court ruling that broadly restricted the ability of the court system to halt the president’s policies.
“There’s a whole range of administrative challenges that would make this completely unworkable, which is why I’m confident we’ll get the nationwide relief we’ve sought when we go back to the lower courts,” Platkin said in an MSNBC appearance.
The nation’s highest court ruled Friday that Trump’s executive order could be partially enforced because lower-court judges had exceeded their authority in issuing nationwide injunctions that blocked the policy. The ruling did not address the underlying constitutionality of Trump’s order, but still drastically limited a judicial tool that has been used for decades, including to block federal policies from multiple presidential administrations.
New Jersey is one of 22 Democratic-led states, along with a group of expectant mothers and immigration organizations, that sued to block the executive order almost immediately after it was issued in January. The injunctions issued by three federal judges in Washington, Maryland and Massachusetts in the ensuing months granted relief not just to those plaintiffs, but everyone in the country.
That move, the Supreme Court majority said Friday, was unconstitutional. Instead, injunctions should be narrowly tailored to provide “complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.” The lower courts will now get the first attempt at tailoring injunctions to comply with the ruling.
On MSNBC, Platkin contended that “complete relief” to the states harmed by the executive order would still involve blocking the executive order across the country.
“It would be impossible to administer a system of citizenship based on which state you live in,” he said.
The suits of the non-state plaintiffs, meanwhile, were quickly refashioned into class-action lawsuits, a legal route that Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted could provide broader relief against the birthright citizenship order in her majority opinion.
The executive order remains blocked for at least 30 days while the courts and parties sort out the next steps.
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