The Daily Fuckup

By July 27, Trump’s birthright-citizenship order was not sitting in legal limbo waiting for the next court date. It was already blocked again.

That mattered because the Supreme Court’s June 27 decision in Trump v. CASA did not decide whether the policy was lawful. It limited how broadly lower courts could issue certain injunctions. Within days, challengers shifted to class-action litigation in New Hampshire, where a federal judge certified a nationwide class and entered a new injunction on July 10. The order was stayed for seven days pending appeal, but the practical result was the same: the policy did not move into effect on July 27.

The timeline also matters. Before the New Hampshire ruling, other injunctions were already in place in related cases. The July 10 order added another barrier rather than creating the first one. So the cleanest reading of the record is not that the administration found fresh room to enforce the policy, but that the policy ran into another court order before the July 27 date arrived.

What remains unresolved is the larger merits fight. The appeals process was still underway, and the Supreme Court’s June ruling left the underlying citizenship issue open. But as of July 27, the administration still did not have a clear path to carry out the birthright-citizenship order. The order remained blocked under the July 10 injunction, alongside the broader litigation still moving through the courts.