Castro v. Trump: the Supreme Court limits the scope of “universal injunctions” to prevent an “imperial judiciary'

 

The Supreme Court correctly limits the so-called equitable power of federal trial courts to avoid what Justice Barrett terms an “imperial judiciary”


Many Americans have been wondering how a trial court judge in one United States District Court has the authority to issue orders and injunctions covering not merely the parties in that case, meaning the plaintiffs in that case, but also the conduct of the United States government within the territories of the United States and indeed, as we have seen, anywhere on the planet Earth, towards entire classes of persons not a party to the suit.  The judicial and linguistic sleight-of-hand used to justify these “universal injunctions” is that such injunctions may be used in suits filed in “equity,” meaning they seek equitable relief, and that the equitable powers of a Federal trial court therefore extend so far as to be almost unlimited. 
 

In the majority opinion of the United States Supreme Court in Castro v. Trump (June 27, 2025) no. 24A884 (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_8n59.pdf), Associate Justice Amy C. Barrett eviscerates this argument by pointing out what equitable “jurisdiction” the courts of the United States do and do not have.  Toward this, she explains how this jurisdiction must necessarily be tethered to the Judicial Act of 1791, wherein Congress set the jurisdiction of our federal courts, given that Article III does not contemplate such injunctions but instead leaves it to Congress to set Federal Court jurisdiction:

The question whether Congress has granted federal courts the authority to universally enjoin the enforcement
of an executive or legislative policy plainly warrants our re-
view. . . .
It is easy to see why. By the end of the Biden administration, we had reached “a state of affairs where almost every
major presidential act [was] immediately frozen by a federal district court.” W. Baude & S. Bray, Comment, Proper Parties, Proper Relief, 137 Harv. L. Rev. 153, 174 (2023).
The trend has continued: During the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, district courts issued approximately 25 universal injunctions. Congressional Research Service, J. Lampe, Nationwide Injunctions in the First Hundred Days of the Second Trump Administration (May 16, 2025). As the number of universal injunctions has increased, so too has the importance of the issue.
. . . . A universal injunction can be justified only as an exercise of equitable authority, yet Congress has granted federal courts no such
power.
The Judiciary Act of 1789 endowed federal courts with jurisdiction over “all suits . . . in equity,” §11, 1 Stat. 78, and still today, this statute “is what authorizes the federal courts to issue equitable remedies,” S. Bray & E. Sherwin, Remedies 442 (4th ed. 2024). Though flexible, this equitable authority is not freewheeling. We have held that the statutory grant encompasses only those sorts of equitable remedies “traditionally accorded by courts of equity” at our country’s inception. [Citation.] that the High Court of Chancery in England possesses”).

We must therefore ask whether universal injunctions are sufficiently “analogous” to the relief issued “ ‘by the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the enactment of the original Judiciary Act.’ ” Grupo Mexicano, 527 U. S., at 318–319 (quoting A. Dobie, Handbook of Federal Jurisdiction and Procedure
660 (1928)).
The answer is no: Neither the universal injunction nor any analogous form of relief was available in the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the founding.
Equity offered a mechanism for the Crown “to secure justice where it would not be secured by the ordinary and existing processes of law.” G. Adams, The Origin of English Equity,
16 Colum. L. Rev. 87, 91 (1916). This “judicial prerogative of the King” thus extended to “those causes which the ordinary judges were incapable of determining.” J. Pomeroy, Equity Jurisprudence §31, p. 27 (1881). Eventually, the Crown instituted the “practice of delegating the cases” that “came before” the judicial prerogative “to the chancellor for his sole decision.” Id., §34, at 28. This “became the common mode of dealing with such controversies.” Ibid.
Of importance here, suits in equity were brought by and against individual parties. Indeed, the “general rule in Equity [was] that all persons materially interested [in the suit] [were] to be made parties to it.” 

. . .  In the ensuing decades, we consistently rebuffed requests
for relief that extended beyond the parties.  

. . .  In fact, universal injunctions were not a feature of federal court litigation until sometime in the 20th century. (Id., pp.4-9 ; footnotes and citations omitted.)

One might ask, then, if universal injunctions are indeed unconstitutional, what checks and balances — other than universal injunctions by a single trial court judge — may be used to make certain the Executive Branch does not have unlimited power.  The answer, which may be gleaned quickly by reading just a few hundred of the words in our brief Constitution, which set forth the power and limits of our three branches of government, is that it is Congress that is essentially delegated the power of checking the power of the presidency.  This includes the power of impeachment and removal from Office, and, more to the point, that only the House of Representatives may initiate the authorization to fund any initiative of the Executive Branch.  It is apparent, then, to anyone with a long-term perspective, that our system of checks and balances, as set by our founding fathers (and we use this gendered term without apology because it is historically accurate), got it right.  By contrast, a discrete subset of our current set of federal District Court Judges, meaning those who have been attempting to thwart our current President’s agenda by virtue of “universal injunctions” of breathtaking scope, have got it wrong.

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Hypothetical - when United States District Court judges set policy by national injunction, which injunction prevails?

 

Which "universal injunction" takes precedence when the hundreds of District Court Judges are allowed to set nation-wide policy?
 
The following hypothetical, which is answered below, illustrates the importance of today's Castro v. Trump opinion.
 
Let us suppose that one United States District Court judge denies a request for a nationwide injunction to bar deportation of illegal aliens, which aliens have already been issued (more than several months ago), a final order of removal and who argue that they are still entitled to challenge their impending removal to third-party countries as opposed to the country of their citizenship.  This court finds the aliens are likely, if not certainly, to lose on the merits because the 30-day time limit to challenge the original order of removal has long passed.

Suppose another judge facing the same issue rules that such an injunction is warranted by “equity,“ and that the United States government must afford these aliens an additional 30 days to appeal being moved to a third-party country, setting this 30 day deadline regarding where they are being taken as a mirror image of the prior 30 day deadline to appeal the final order of removal, which original deadline, as noted has long since passed.

A third District Court judge issues a similar injunction stating that even though these persons about to be deported to a third country are now entitled to additional “due process“ and have the right to challenge their deportation to a third country rather than the country in which they are a citizen.  However, this third judge does not set a specific deadline, instead relying on the litigants to argue over “due process" they are entitled to in each of their cases, stating the amount of "due process" which each is entitled-to depends on the practicalities of their bringing a challenge to third-party deportation while in custody. 

The question becomes which ruling, meaning which "universal" or "nationwide" injunction, or, for that matter, which ruling against such an injunction, constitutes precedence as to other persons who are not named in the suit are similarly situated.  We assume, of course, that the orders granting the injunction are written broadly to cover all persons.  To make this a bit more interesting, we will suppose that each injunction is issued in a different District Court in a different Judicial Circuit, and that each of these Circuit Courts has refused requests to issue a stay of these trial court orders. We will also assume the Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on the issue of whether there is to be additional due process where there is to be removal to a third-party country.

The question, then, is:  which injunction ruling will prevail in other parts of the United States? 
 
The answer, at least according to leading law firms , is the government must abide by each injunction issued, even if not fully  harmonious or in outright conflict
 
Our hypothetical is of course, similar to other recent injunction issued by Federal "trial court" Judges who have exercised virtually unlimited jurisdiction and attempted to control the execution of public policy by the executive branch, such as the direction of planes, the whereabouts of foreign citizens held in foreign jails, etc.  Given that so many injunctions have been sought and granted, with counsel often from leading law firms, the  question is which universal injunction should prevail when they are, to say the least, not entirely in sync. 
 
The answer, of course, coming from the positions taken by many of the leading law firms in America, is that all of them prevail. This is because these law firms have argued for such broad jurisdiction that there is little, if any limit, on what an individual trial court judge may do.  These suits seeking universal injunctions are usually brought in “equity” and, as these major law firms have argued, the jurisdiction of federal trial courts extends far beyond the litigants before them.
 

 

 

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