- The judges end the nine-month term with three major rulings.
- Court allows state bans on transgender student athletes.
- It supports the Republican challenge to limit campaign spending.
The U.S. Supreme Court dealt President Donald Trump a bad defeat Tuesday by rejecting his bid to limit birthright citizenship on the final day of his landmark election term, as states ban transgender student athletes from women’s sports teams and cut more campaign finance limits.
The top US court’s annual term – nine months long – was packed with big decisions, including some big wins for Trump on areas such as presidential powers and immigration, as well as losses for him on tariffs, the firing of a Federal Reserve official and on Tuesday birthright citizenship.
The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority that includes three Trump appointees.
Limiting birthright citizenship was one of the top priorities of the Republican president’s crackdown on immigration — so much so that he signed an executive order on the matter on his first day back in office last year.
Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored Tuesday’s 6-3 decision, said Trump’s directive violated language in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment that guarantees citizenship to virtually everyone born in the United States, with a few narrow exceptions.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to participate freely in our political community,” Roberts wrote, adding that the authors of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to every freeborn person in the country.
“We are keeping that promise today,” Roberts wrote.
Trump’s directive instructed federal agencies not to recognize citizenship for children born in the United States if neither parent is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, also known as a “green card” holder. Critics have accused Trump of racial and religious discrimination in his approach to immigration.
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War that ended slavery in the United States, grants citizenship to those born in the United States who are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” There were narrow exceptions such as children of foreign diplomats or members of an enemy occupation force.
Before the ruling, some experts had estimated that Trump’s directive could affect the legal status of as many as 250,000 babies born each year and could require the families of millions more to prove their newborns’ citizenship status.
Transgender sport
The controversy over transgender athletes has become embroiled in the American culture wars.
Laws in West Virginia and Idaho designate sports teams at public schools, including universities, according to “biological sex” and exclude “male students” from female teams. The states said the laws preserve fair and safe competition for women and girls. Twenty-five other states have similar laws.
Critics saw the measures as part of a broader attack on the rights of transgender Americans by Trump and various states.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned lower court rulings involving transgender students who challenged the bans in the two states as unconstitutional and a federal non-discrimination law.
The court ruled 9-0 that the state laws do not violate Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination in education “on the basis of sex.”
The justices split along ideological lines — with the six conservative justices in the majority — in ruling that the measures also do not violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.
“Consistent with Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, we hold that states can maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological women. They can determine eligibility for women’s and girls’ sports based on biological sex. The Constitution and Title IX do not require a review of women’s and girls’ sports throughout conservative Justice.”
It was the court’s second major ruling against transgender plaintiffs in a year. In a June 2025 case from Tennessee, it allowed states to ban gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender minors.
Campaign financing
The court has ruled against various campaign finance restrictions since 2010. On Tuesday, it sided with Republican challengers, including Vice President JD Vance, to federal limits on coordinated spending between political parties and candidates, as major Republican committees head into November’s midterm elections with a significant cash advantage over their Democratic counterparts.
The decision was 6-3, driven by the conservative justices. The court found that the current cap on the amount of money parties can spend on campaigns with input from candidates violated the Constitution’s First Amendment protections against government curtailment of free speech.
A companion term
The court handed down several important rulings during its tenure.
In February, it rejected Trump’s sweeping global tariffs being pursued under a law meant for national emergencies.
On Monday, it upheld Trump’s firing of a member of the Federal Trade Commission, expanding his powers over the government while overturning a 1935 precedent that had long limited presidents’ ability to fire officials at independent agencies. But it also, in a separate case, refused to let him immediately fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
The court in April cleared a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in a victory for Republicans. This month, it let the Trump administration revoke a humanitarian status that protected hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants from deportation and sided with him on asylum seekers.
The court further expanded gun rights this month. It struck down a Hawaii law that restricted the carrying of handguns on private property open to the public, like most businesses, without the owner’s permission. It also limited the application of a US law that prohibits the possession of firearms by certain drug users.
