The Supreme Court just helped advance one of the more extreme measures in Trump’s war on immigrants. In a 6-3 ruling, it limited the power of federal courts to issue universal injunctions on the Trump administration’s agenda. These measures were previously blocking Trump’s attempt to ban birthright citizenship by executive order.
This ruling comes as the Trump administration is in a moment of weakness as the contradictions of a declining U.S. imperialism, polarized national politics, and emerging class struggle has greatly limited its ability to carry out its agenda. While Trump’s approval ratings continue to plummet, attacks on immigrants are one of the few elements holding the Trump coalition together.
This latest Supreme Court ruling does not go all the way in banning birthright citizenship. The justices refrained from ruling on whether Trump’s executive order violates the 14th amendment or the Nationality Act. This is in line with the way the court has been trying to maintain stability for the U.S. regime by ruling just enough to keep the executive branch in check, while not touching rulings that fundamentally strike at Trump’s agenda since that would risk a full-blown constitutional crisis. The ruling will take 30 days to go into effect, leaving space for legal maneuvering from federal courts.
This ruling will certainly embolden the administration, which has already shown its willingness to pursue extreme measures and destroy families in pursuit of mass deportations. It also limits the power of federal judges to slow down Trump’s attacks. This case has implications well beyond the issue of immigration because the ruling creates more space for Trump to engage in executive overreach.
The Courts Won’t Save Us, but a Mass Movement Can
As a result of this news, the immigrant rights movement and all who are fighting the Far Right must be clear: We cannot count on the courts to save us. While the courts have played a role in limiting Trump’s agenda, they have mainly done this due to the pressure from below. These institutions are founded to protect the interests of the private-property-owning few and uphold a constitution built on settler colonialism and slavery, and exploitation of the working masses.
The Supreme Court is the exact opposite of democracy and has moved increasingly to the right.
None of this means we should be demoralized — It means we have to fight harder. In fact, we have a basis for this: Immigrant youth-led protests across the country, with their epicenter in Los Angeles, have garnered national support. The developing movement for immigrant rights has already forced the hand of the administration on important issues like returning Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States and securing the release of Mahmoud Khalil and several other targeted university activists from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention.
Much of the success of the movement came from the fact that the young people leading it did not just wait for the Democrats to resist Trump, but took action themselves. This shows the importance of people organizing independently of the Democratic Party, which acts as the graveyard of social movements. By maintaining this independence from the capitalists in the Democratic Party and other capitalist institutions like the courts, our movement can continue to advance. We should be proud of our wins and use them to activate even wider sectors of society who are eager to fight Trump’s attacks and are beginning to reckon with the limits of relying on this anti-immigrant regime to constrain the xenophobic Far Right.
Along with drawing in wider sectors to a class-independent resistance, the immigrant rights movement must push for labor to take up the fight for immigrant rights. ICE’s brutal attack on SEIU leader David Huerta shows how the war on immigrants is also an attack on the labor movement. Unions’ response to the attack on Huerta was limited, but still it served as an important reminder of the unique power that labor has to impose demands on the state by threatening to grind production to a halt. The immigrant rights movement can take note of this and demand the leaders of the labor movement use the full firepower of labor to defend immigrant rights.
With such a blatant example of the limits of relying on the courts to save us, all who are fighting for immigrant rights have an opportunity to discuss a strategy that relies on our own power to resist the war on immigrants and put those carrying it out on the back foot.
