Searching for Clarity in Trump v. CASA, Inc.

Shock-and-Awe 2.0 began on Inauguration Day 2025 as robustly as had been announced in the weeks leading up to the event. It included a barrage of presidential executive orders: twenty-five of them that first afternoon alone.

Some had provocative titles, foreshadowing possible controversy and conflict. Others were simple and apparently benign. The latter stack included Executive Order No. 14160, Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship (January 20, 2025).

But EO 14160 was no mere patriotic pablum. It was full-blown Orwellian misdirection: a bright and sunny title masking a brazen and unconstitutional assault on “birthright citizenship.”

Within 24 hours or so, an array of plaintiffs – immigrant-rights groups, advocacy organizations, expectant non-citizen parents, and at least 22 individual states – challenged this edict in several federal courts around the U.S. Within a week or so, their concerns were vindicated with strong judicial push back against the government overreach and nonchalant tinkering with rock-solid constitutional protections.

By early to mid-February 2025, there were four preliminary injunctions in place: three were “nationwide” or “universal” in scope and became the focus of a serious freakout by the White House. In each such lawsuit, appellate panels quickly and forcefully affirmed the trial judges’ rulings. The trial and appellate courts also easily brushed off the routine subsequent motions for stays of the injunctive relief.

It’s important to point out that TROs and preliminary injunctions are not handed out like candy. There are serious hoops that plaintiffs must jump through in order to prevail on what is considered “extraordinary” interim relief to prevent “irreparable harm.” And injunctive relief that is nationwide in scope is not casually granted.

In ordinary times, the executive branch would have withdrawn the faulty edict and slinked away quietly to gear up for the next battle.

But these are not ordinary times.

In early March, the White House gave new orders to the acting Solicitor General, Sarah Harris, to steer these cases to the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket.” And that’s the point where this litigation went entirely off the rails, which was revealed in Trump v. CASA, Inc. 606 U.S. ___ (June 27, 2025).

Setting the Stage

This saga, of course, is about the one particular executive order – namely, EO No. 14160: Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship (January 20, 2025) – although others issued that same day also received considerable attention.

See our earlier posts:

• The Latest on the Controversial Universal-Injunction Ruling (August 7, 2025)
• The Nationwide-Injunctions Ban: Is Clarity Possible? (August 15, 2025)

Donald Trump wasted no time serving up a directive purporting to end “birthright citizenship.” That is, American citizenship would be effectively barred to “anyone born on U.S. soil without at least one parent who is either a citizen or lawful permanent resident.” The order would apply “even to some children born to mothers who are in the country lawfully but temporarily, such as those who are ‘visiting on a student or tourist visa.’” See Trump Order Purports to End Constitutionally-Protected Birthright Citizenship (January 21, 2025, 4:32 pm EST) Quinta Juracic, lawfaremedia.org.

That interpretation goes against settled constitutional law. “Since 1898, when the Supreme Court issued its ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, courts have recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to any individual born on American soil, with narrow exceptions carved out only for babies born to foreign diplomats or invading armies.” See Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order Faces Immediate Challenges (January 21, 2025, 6:33 pm EST) Anna Bower, Esq., lawfaremedia.org.

An army of opponents was ready. They had encountered this threat in the first Trump administration and on the campaign trail several times. It was trotted out often to appease the base. See, for example, a news story from days before the 2018 midterms: “President Trump indicated plans to sign an executive order revoking birthright citizenship—returning to a proposal he floated early in the 2016 Republican presidential primary.”

The Three Primary Lawsuits

This bizarre journey in the court system began on about January 21, 2025 in three separate dockets in Massachusetts, Maryland, and the Eastern District of Washington. As soon as the Solicitor General became involved in March 2025, the three lawsuits were consolidated for purposes of decision into a single high-court docket.

• Casa Inc. v. Trump, District Court, D. Maryland, 8:25-cv-00201, Complaint — Document #1 (January 21, 2025). Plaintiffs: Trinidad Garcia, Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, CASA Inc., Liza, Maribel, Juana, Monica.
• State of Washington v. Trump, District Court, W.D. Washington, 2:25-cv-00127, Complaint — Document #1 (January 21, 2025, 10:23 am PST). Plaintiffs: State of Washington, State of Arizona, State of Illinois, and State of Oregon. [Later, a related lawsuit with three individual plaintiffs was folded into this action.]
• State of New Jersey v. Trump, District Court, D. Massachusetts, 1:25-cv-10139, Complaint — Document #1 (January 21, 2025, 12:31 pm EST). Plaintiffs: State of New Jersey (and 20 other jurisdictions including Massachusetts, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawai’i, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, and City & County of San Francisco.)

For readers who want to delve deeply into the nuts and bolts of the court proceedings and the issues at play, check out the comprehensive docket listings and hyperlinks. They are courtesy of CourtListener, a Free Law Project. It is a 50l(c)(3) resource available online without charge. Each federal-district-court case docket includes numbered hyperlinks to all filings: pleadings, briefs (including from amici curiae), attachments and exhibits, correspondence to and from the court, instructions, memoranda of law, orders, decisions, and official rulings. The service also offers real-time filing updates and alert notifications.

CourtListener also creates a parallel docketing track as soon as there is a related appellate court filing. For example, in connection with the State of Washington v. Trump lawsuit that began in the Western District of Washington, there is a new and separate docket for the litigation in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

There is also a link at CourtListener for when lower court cases eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court, but I prefer Justia.com for that purpose. It’s presented in a handy printer-friendly format, with separate links for the majority opinion and for each concurring and dissenting opinion. It also includes docket links to briefs and other relevant source material. See the entry for Trump v. CASA, Inc.

A Detour Into the Shadow Docket 

Now we jump forward to when the acting Solicitor General, Sarah Harris, approached the U.S. Supreme Court with a “modest request.” See Application for a Partial Stay of the Injunction Issued by the United States District Court for the District of Maryland (March 2025). Almost identical pleadings were filed in the other two lawsuits. The three were consolidated for decision. See Trump asks Supreme Court to step in on birthright citizenship (March 13, 2025, updated March 14, 2025, 2:34 pm EST) Amy Howe, scotusblog.com.

Recall that this tactic of asking for a stay had occurred after the government had already lost the routine  stay motions in the original trial and appellate rounds after the “remedy/relief” decisions were issued, (e.g., order granting preliminary injunction; order affirming district court’s granting of injunctive relief). That’s a huge stack of opinions with bad news for the White House.

But the administration – deeply unhappy with the flurry of injunctions against its policies, the numbers for February 2025 were off the charts! – was not deterred.  Executive-branch officials wanted to put up roadblocks to nationwide injunctions, loudly placing the blame for the proliferation of them on out-of-control judges and partisan plaintiffs.

Arguing that “enough is enough,” Ms. Harris presented a full-court press in her Application to the high-court justices, despite the legal arguments having already been presented and soundly rejected many times over.

The consolidated plaintiffs submitted a powerful Opposition to Application for a Partial Stay of the Injunction Issued by the United States District Court for the District of Maryland (April 4, 2025). “There is nothing ‘modest’ about the government’s request for emergency relief in this case…. ,” plaintiffs’ counsel began. “On his first day in office, the President issued an Executive Order that purports to upend birthright citizenship by executive fiat. But birthright citizenship is at the core of our Nation’s foundational precept that all people born on our soil are created equal, regardless of their parentage. Following this Court’s infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), and the Civil War that decision helped ignite, Congress passed and the States ratified the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to enshrine birthright citizenship in the Constitution, where no President could unilaterally take it away.”

Most of this opposition brief focused on shoring up the appropriateness of injunctive relief, particularly the orders that are nationwide in scope. During this “shadow-docket” phase, the emphasis by the government’s lawyers shifted away from the no-chance-at-all effort to chip away at “birthright citizenship” and over to a desperate attempt to pull the plug on nationwide/universal injunctions once and for all. Of course, that approach is off the mark. Correlation, we were frequently reminded in law school, is not causation. The correct remedy for so many universal injunctions piling up in such a short time: Stop casually violating the U.S. Constitution.

Conclusion

That message was woven expertly (and with no-holds-barred) into the outstanding dissenting opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayer in the June 27, 2025, Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. CASA, Inc.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her submission, noted that she agreed “with every word of Justice Sotomayor’s dissent” but wrote “separately to emphasize a key conceptual point: The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law….” The “Executive’s bid to vanquish so-called ‘universal injunctions’ is, at bottom, a request for this Court’s permission to engage in unlawful behavior….”

We’ll continue in this “shadow-docket” in the next post.

– Linda J. Rosenthal, J.D. FPLG Information & Research Director