Don’t Celebrate Too Soon: National Injunctions

The Supreme Court enacted its annual dump of cases not that far back, and amidst all the furor, one bit of news stood out to many: Trump v CASA brought an end to the national injunctions issued by judges across the country, ruling them comprehensively invalid. To many this seems a complete victory, an end to the general power of the courts, a restriction holding back our judicial overlords from interfering except on a case-by-case basis. We shouldn’t be too quick to count our chickens, though; national injunctions may be gone, but the Supreme Court has left other tools for tyrannical judges to exert their power. In this case, the specific danger comes from class action lawsuits.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v CASA explicitly only deals with the question of national injunctions (Page 9 of PDF). A national injunction, to be clear, is a judge stating that because of the facts alleged in the specific case he has in front of him, such and such is to be done not only in his case but in all analogous cases; in the government’s words, “A nationwide injunction is generally defined as an injunction against the government that prevents the government from implementing a challenged law, regulation, or other policy against all relevant persons and entities, whether or not such persons or entities are parties participating in the litigation.” For instance, he might prevent the “removal of non-citizens to countries not included on their removal orders without notice and an opportunity to contest the removal,” to excerpt a real example from March 2025.

As Justice Barrett lays out in the majority opinion in Trump v CASA, injunctions have historically been limited to the parties of the case, whether plaintiff or defender (Page 12-14). This makes sense! Injunctions are not verdicts, after all; they are meant to be means of preventing irreparable harm in the case at hand until it can be adjudicated, not effective vetoes of legislation. Barrett quotes a relevant case in her opinion, stating, “It is an elementary principle that a court cannot adjudicate directly upon a person’s right without having him either actually or constructively before it” (Page 21). All this is to say: national and universal injunctions were always bad law, grasping constructs used by judges with agendas and egos to usurp the powers of the president and congress.

Striking down these travesties is undoubtedly a good move by the Supreme Court, and we should be happy about it. We shouldn’t think that this one battle is even close to winning the war, though, and we shouldn’t dream that judges are out of ways to excuse their power-grabbing. Judicial overreach has reached a new fever-pitch of openness in the Trump era, though perhaps without exceeding the magnitude it achieved before, and this decision won’t be enough to stop it. The next choice for ambitious judges is the class action lawsuit.

Justice Alito warns of this probability in his concurring decision: “But district courts should not view today’s decision as an invitation to certify nationwide classes without scrupulous adherence to the rigors of Rule 23. Otherwise, the universal injunction will return from the grave under the guise of ‘nationwide class relief,’ and today’s decision will be of little more than minor academic interest” (Page 41). Rule 23, as Alito cites it, is the rule for assembling a class, and judges have no more reason to respect it than they did the rules of injunctions. In fact, the class action excuse has already been used at least once.

The ACLU is championing the class action theory in ‘Barbara’ v Donald J. Trump. This class action is a direct attempt to counter Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, and to do that it relies on asserting a class action wherein the plaintiffs represent “a class of all current and future children who are or will be denied United States citizenship,” a category which explicitly includes those not yet born. The sheer chutzpah of the ACLU championing the pre-birth infant is breathtaking (though likely of only rhetorical use in dealing with abortion- possibly this lawsuit can be used to cross-pollinate those outraged by judicial tyranny and those outraged by baby-murder, to the furthering of both causes).

The use of class actions to justify national injunctions by back-dooring everybody affected by the statute into being technical parties of the case is not the only trick that’s likely to be used. It might not even turn out to be the most effective for the liberal cause. The point of recognizing it, then, is not its unique evil; it’s for us to realize that the victory in Trump v CASA is just a start. There are other issues; as Politico says with some glee, “Moreover, even if the Supreme Court thinks these alternative routes should also be narrowed, litigating those separate issues could take months or years to resolve.”

We must not take this victory as an excuse to slack off; we need to keep applying pressure to the judiciary, the pressure of public attention and scrutiny, of calls for real justice and judicial righteousness. Still the words of Isaiah 1:23 describe our rulers all too well: “They do not bring justice to the fatherless, and the widow's cause does not come to them’; we must continue to strive until by His grace, our nation may, imperfectly as yet, “be redeemed by justice” (Is. 1:27).

God bless.

 Colson Potter is a writer and pre-law student with one published novel and more on the way. He loves investigating Christian theology, historic, systematic, and political, and applying it to politics both theoretical and practical, across the local, national, and international scales. Apart from this, he's an enthusiastic martial artist with a recent brown belt in Krav Maga. His other writing, including multiple short stories and weekly articles on writing, theology, and politics, can be found at CreationalStory.com.