Immigration Article of the Day: In CASA You Missed It by Mila Sohoni
In CASA You Missed It by Mila Sohoni, 139 Harvard Law Review (forthcoming 2026)
Abstract
This Essay’s purpose is to show how Trump v. CASA should be read—and how it emphatically should not be read. While CASA rejected one pathway to universal injunctive relief on statutory grounds, the decision simultaneously left intact a number of alternative routes to broad relief, including complete relief injunctions, universal remedies under the APA and other statutes, class actions, and relief based on associational and state standing.
The Trump Administration, however, has consistently advanced inflated readings of CASA, characterizing it as a far more sweeping limitation on remedial scope than the decision actually was. But a close examination of CASA’s holding, reasoning, and limitations reveals why it is a grave error to portray lower courts issuing broad remedies in the wake of CASA as acting in defiance of the decision. Lower courts that are correctly perceiving CASA’s metes and bounds and conscientiously grappling with them across widely varied legal and factual contexts are not defying CASA’s mandate, but rather are doing the work that CASA left them no choice but to do. Those who depict this judicial work as insubordination whenever it results in a broad-gauged remedy against the executive branch have fundamentally misunderstood the task that CASA left to the lower courts.
By framing legitimate judicial deliberation as defiance and insubordination, the Trump Administration’s rhetoric threatens to poison intra-branch dialogue within the Article III judiciary and to corrode the legitimacy of judicial review by casting legitimate judicial intervention as illegitimate political resistance. Ultimately, CASA’s most significant danger may lie not in its holding, but in the Trump Administration’s instrumental use of the decision as part of its broader effort to undermine judicial review across the board. A correct understanding of CASA’s actual scope—including its limitations and unresolved questions—is essential both for fending off strategic misrepresentations of the decision and also for preserving the foundational principle that in America, all government officers, “from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law and are bound to obey it,” United States v. Lee, 106 U.S. 196, 220 (1882). |
