最高法院努力限制法官在出生公民权案件中的权力
【中美创新时报2025 年 5 月 16 日编译讯】（记者温友平编译）周四，最高法院对特朗普政府的投诉进行了辩论，特朗普政府抱怨称，联邦法官超越了他们的权限，暂时阻止了特朗普针对全国实施的一些政策举措。《纽约时报》记者艾比·范西克尔对此作了下述报道。
几位法官似乎在两种担忧之间左右为难。他们似乎对单个地区法官是否应该拥有在全国范围内冻结行政行为的权力表示怀疑。
但他们似乎也对该案件所依据的行政命令的合法性和后果感到不安：唐纳德·特朗普总统上任第一天就发布了一项命令，终止出生公民权，或授予所有在美国出生的婴儿自动公民身份。
三名联邦下级法官表示，特朗普的行政令违反了宪法第十四修正案以及长期以来的先例，阻碍了该政策在全国范围内实施。法官们采取了不同寻常的举措，同意听取口头辩论，以决定法官是否应该将裁决范围仅限于就该行政令提起诉讼的州、倡导团体和个人。
特朗普政府曾要求法官考虑此类禁令的合法性，这些禁令已成为特朗普议程的重大障碍。
但法官们似乎对于如何迅速评估该命令的合法性感到困惑，因为政府并没有要求他们审查该命令。
“这起案件与我们全国范围内的许多禁令案件截然不同，在这些案件中，我们许多人都对地方法院的办事方式表示不满，”大法官埃琳娜·卡根（Elena Kagan）表示，这似乎表达了多位大法官的观点。她指出，此类禁令在民主党和共和党政府执政期间都曾被用来阻止政策的实施。
卡根说：“在特朗普第一届政府中，这一切都是在旧金山完成的，而在下一届政府中，这一切都是在德克萨斯州完成的，这种机制带来了一个大问题。”
她说，出生公民权案提出了一个潜在的独特问题：政府可能会在下级法院屡败屡战，但如果这些败诉仅限于提起诉讼的个人，而非数百万其他民众，政府可能不会上诉。那么，最高法院将如何评判该命令的合宪性呢？
“您如何才能迅速地将案件的是非曲直告知我们？”尼尔·戈萨奇大法官向新泽西州检察长办公室的一名律师询问。新泽西州是就该行政令提起诉讼的 22 个民主党主导的州之一。
法官们表示，他们可能会尝试找到一个中间立场，或许可以发布指导意见，允许在全国范围内实施临时禁令，但仅限于某些类型的案件，或者要求对相关行政命令的实质内容进行更多简报。
大法官布雷特·卡瓦诺向司法部长 D. 约翰·索尔施压，询问特朗普政府计划如何执行该命令。
“医院如何处理新生儿？”卡瓦诺问道。“各州如何处理新生儿？”
索尔回答说：“联邦官员必须解决这个问题。”
特朗普政府并非首个面临下级法院联邦法官全面阻止政策问题的国家。关于此类冻结是否合法的争论已持续多年。但特朗普上任以来对此尤为愤怒。
在特朗普的各项举措正在法庭审理期间，白宫因一系列问题被法官阻止执行。这些举措包括，特朗普有权扣留多元化学校的资金，将跨性别女性转移至联邦监狱，以及取消数十万委内瑞拉移民的驱逐出境保护。
限制全国性禁令的裁决可能会极大地重塑联邦法院处理对特朗普政策挑战的方式，限制联邦法官迅速阻止政策的权力，并增强行政权力。反对特朗普行动的团体很可能不得不提起多项个人诉讼，或寻求其他法律途径，例如集体诉讼。
周四的辩论主要集中在技术性法律问题上，即其他法律途径是否能产生与全国性禁令相同的实际效果。索尔认为，像集体诉讼认证这样的工具——法官同意代表一大群处境类似的人提起诉讼——将是处理行政行为纠纷的更好方法。
凯尔西·B·科克兰 (Kelsi B. Corkran) 是一名律师，代表挑战该政策的移民权益组织进行辩护。她表示，这种机制非常繁琐，可能会延迟那些挑战诸如寻求终止出生公民权之类的命令的人获得救济。
最高法院此前从未直接就全国禁令的合法性作出裁决，部分原因是近年来法官使用该工具的频率大大增加。
但此前已有数名大法官表示反对使用这些禁令。在2020年的一项裁决中，戈萨奇批评了“全国性”、“普遍性”或“宇宙性”范围的禁令，并写道，此类“显然行不通”的裁决正在“制造混乱”。大法官塞缪尔·阿利托最近也批评了全国范围内的禁令，其他保守派人士也加入了反对意见。
周四，在争论开始前，特朗普在社交媒体上发帖称此事为“大案”。他没有回应全国禁令的问题，而是为自己的公民身份令辩护。
“出生公民权并不是为了让那些带着家人去度假，然后成为美国永久公民，还一直嘲笑我们是‘傻瓜’的人！”特朗普写道。
出生公民权——即授予在美国出生的人公民身份的做法，即使其父母不是美国公民——长期以来一直被认为是移民法的一项原则。内战后批准的《第十四修正案》规定：“所有在美国出生或归化美国并受美国管辖的人，均为美国公民，并为其所居住州的公民。”
1898年，最高法院在具有里程碑意义的案件“美国诉黄金德案”中确认了这项权利。一个多世纪以来，法院一直维护这一宪法解释。
即使特朗普政府影响了法官们的判断，特朗普行政命令的直接影响也尚不完全明朗。挑战该命令的团体警告称，这将带来混乱，提起诉讼的州可能会终止出生公民权，而未提起诉讼的州则不会。
大法官索尼娅·索托马约尔周四也表达了类似的担忧，她认为该行政命令违反了最高法院的多项判例。她表示，如果法官无权阻止该命令的执行，将影响“成千上万出生时没有公民身份证明的儿童”。她还表示，如果父母的祖国不承认他们为公民，其中一些儿童可能会成为无国籍人士。
特朗普政府的律师称这种担忧被夸大了，并抱怨说，全国范围内的禁令甚至阻止了行政部门通过撰写或发布有关政策如何实施的指导来准备执行特朗普的命令。
辩论开始前，数十人聚集在最高法院外，举着标语、高呼口号，抗议移民权利。
其中一名示威者是移民权益组织 CASA 的法律总监阿玛·弗里姆蓬 (Ama Frimpong)，该组织因该行政命令提起了诉讼。她说，她认为政府的论点是“对黑人和棕色人种家庭的攻击”。
法庭内，两名司法部高级官员坐在公众席的前排。司法部副部长托德·布兰奇和另一位高级官员埃米尔·博夫坐在一起，面无表情地密切关注着听证会。卡根谈到特朗普政府在案件中不断败诉以及她认为他们会继续败诉的信念时，观众一度大笑。博夫和布兰奇却没有。
虽然法官们已经针对特朗普政府其他行动引发的紧急申请发布了书面命令，但周四的案件是特朗普重返办公室以来最高法院首次听取因其一项政策而引发的口头辩论。
这场辩论发生在法官们听完本届任期内所有预定审理的案件之后，以及他们开始发布今年最重要的判决之前的几周——这一不同寻常的举动表明法官们认为这场争议非常重要，需要立即审议。
目前，特朗普的行政命令在全国范围内仍被封锁，法官们仍在审理此案。法院可能要到6月底或7月初才会做出裁决，但此案的特殊情况可能会促使法院更快地采取行动。
本文最初发表于《纽约时报》。
题图：周四，一名妇女带着儿子在最高法院外抗议，当时最高法院正在听取关于禁令和公民身份的辩论。德鲁·安格雷尔
附原英文报道：
Supreme Court wrestles with limiting judges’ power in birthright citizenship case
By Abbie VanSickle New York Times,Updated May 15, 2025, 11:29 p.m.
A woman with her son protested outside the Supreme Court Thursday, as arguments on injunctions and citizenship were heard.DREW ANGERER
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court wrestled on Thursday with the Trump administration’s complaints that federal judges have exceeded their authority in temporarily blocking some of his policy moves for the whole country.
Several of the justices appeared torn between two concerns. They appeared skeptical that single district judges should have the power to freeze executive actions throughout the nation.
But they also seemed troubled by the legality — and consequences — of the executive order underlying the case: an order issued by President Donald Trump on his first day in office ending birthright citizenship, or the granting of automatic citizenship to all babies born in the United States.
Three lower federal judges have said Trump’s order violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution as well as long-standing precedent and blocked the policy across the country. In an unusual move, the justices had agreed to hear oral argument on whether the judges should have limited their rulings only to the states, advocacy groups and individuals that had sued over the order.
The Trump administration had asked the justices to consider the legality of such injunctions, which have been a major impediment to Trump’s agenda.
But the justices appeared to struggle with how they might quickly weigh in on the legality of the order, which the administration had not asked them to review.
“This case is very different from a lot of our nationwide injunction cases in which many of us have expressed frustration at the way district courts are doing their business,” Justice Elena Kagan said, appearing to articulate the view of several of the justices. She noted that such injunctions have been used to block policies under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
“In the first Trump administration, it was all done in San Francisco, and then in the next administration, it was all done in Texas, and there is a big problem that is created by that mechanism,” Kagan said.
The birthright citizenship case, she said, presents a potentially unique problem: The government could lose repeatedly in lower courts, but if those losses applied only to individuals who sued and not millions of others, the government might not appeal. How then would the Supreme Court weigh in on the order’s constitutionality?
“How would you get the merits of this case to us promptly?” Justice Neil Gorsuch asked a lawyer for the attorney general’s office in New Jersey, one of 22 Democratic-led states that have sued over the order.
The justices signaled that they might try to find a middle ground, perhaps by issuing guidance that would allow temporary nationwide injunctions but only for some kinds of cases, or by requesting more briefing on the merits of the underlying executive order.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh pressed Solicitor General D. John Sauer on how the Trump administration planned to carry out its order.
“What do hospitals do with a newborn?” Kavanaugh asked. “What do states do with a newborn?”
Sauer replied that “federal officials will have to figure that out.”
The Trump administration is not the first to confront the issue of lower court federal judges blocking policies on a sweeping basis. The debate over whether such freezes are legal has simmered for years. But Trump has expressed particular outrage about them since he returned to office.
On issue after issue, the White House has been stopped by judges from carrying out Trump’s initiatives while they are litigated in court. Those efforts include his ability to withhold funds from schools with diversity programs, to relocate transgender women in federal prisons and to remove deportation protections from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants.
A decision that limits nationwide injunctions could dramatically reshape how federal courts handle challenges to Trump’s policies, curbing the power of federal judges to swiftly block policies and bolstering executive power. Groups opposing Trump’s actions would most likely have to bring many individual claims, or pursue other legal pathways, such as class-action lawsuits.
Much of Thursday’s argument focused on technical legal questions related to whether other legal pathways would provide the same practical effect of a nationwide injunction. Sauer argued that tools like class-action certification — in which a judge agrees a lawsuit can proceed on behalf of a large group of similarly situated people — would be better ways to handle disputes over executive actions.
Kelsi B. Corkran, a lawyer who argued on behalf of immigrant advocacy groups that challenged the policy, said such mechanisms were cumbersome and could delay relief for those challenging orders like the one seeking to end birthright citizenship.
The Supreme Court has never before ruled directly on the legality of nationwide injunctions, in part because judges have used the tool far more frequently in recent years.
But several justices have previously signaled opposition to their use. In a 2020 decision, Gorsuch criticized injunctions of “‘nationwide,’ ‘universal’ or ‘cosmic’ scope,” writing that such “patently unworkable” rulings were “sowing chaos.” Justice Samuel Alito has also criticized nationwide blocks in a recent dissent joined by other conservatives.
In a social media post Thursday before the argument began, Trump called the matter a “big case.” He did not address the question of nationwide injunctions, but instead defended his citizenship order.
“Birthright Citizenship was not meant for people taking vacations to become permanent Citizens of the United States of America, and bringing their families with them, all the time laughing at the ‘SUCKERS’ that we are!” Trump wrote.
Birthright citizenship — the practice of granting citizenship to people born in the United States, even to parents who are not citizens — has long been considered a tenet of immigration law. The 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, declared that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
In 1898, the Supreme Court affirmed that right in a landmark case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark. For more than a century, courts have upheld that constitutional interpretation.
Should the Trump administration sway the justices, the immediate implications for Trump’s executive action would not be entirely clear. The groups that have challenged the order have warned of chaos, with birthright citizenship potentially ending in the states that sued but not in those that did not.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed similar concerns Thursday, arguing that the executive order violated multiple Supreme Court precedents. If judges were not allowed to block it, she said, it would affect “thousands of children who are going to be born without citizenship papers.” Some of them, she said, could be rendered stateless if their parents’ home countries did not accept them as citizens.
Trump administration lawyers have called such fears overblown, and complained that nationwide injunctions have prevented the executive branch from even preparing to carry out Trump’s orders by writing or issuing guidance about how a policy might work.
Dozens of people gathered outside the Supreme Court before the arguments to protest for immigrants’ rights, carrying signs and chanting.
One of the demonstrators, Ama Frimpong, a legal director at CASA, an immigration advocacy group that sued over the executive order, said that she saw the government’s argument as “an attack on Black and brown families.”
Inside the courtroom, two top Justice Department officials were seated at the front of a section for members of the public. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, and another senior official, Emil Bove, sat together and watched the hearing closely and impassively. At one point, when Kagan discussed the Trump administration’s continuous losses in the cases and her belief that they would continue to lose, the audience laughed. Bove and Blanche did not.
While the justices have issued written orders in response to emergency applications that arose from other Trump administration actions, Thursday’s case was the first time since Trump returned to office that the Supreme Court heard an oral argument stemming from one of his policies.
The argument took place after the justices heard all of their scheduled cases this term, and in the weeks before they begin issuing their most consequential decisions of the year — an unusual move that signals that the justices regard the dispute as significant enough to consider immediately.
For now, Trump’s executive order remains blocked throughout the country while the justices consider the case. The court might not issue a decision until late June or early July, but the unusual posture of the case could prompt quicker action.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
