The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the 14th Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship in a 6-3 decision that struck down President Trump's executive order denying automatic citizenship to babies born in the United States to undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors, then hours later cleared states to bar transgender women from female school and college sports.
The twin rulings, delivered on the closing day of the court's term, hand Trump his most significant judicial defeat on immigration and a companion victory on a signature culture-war promise. They also cap a term in which the court has repeatedly split the difference between the president's ambitions and the constitutional limits his lawyers have asked it to relax. Monday's decisions blocked Trump's attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook while expanding his firing power over other independent agencies; Tuesday's pair extends that pattern to the 14th Amendment itself.
The citizenship ruling
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a majority that included fellow conservative Amy Coney Barrett and the court's three liberals, held that children born in the United States "to parents unlawfully or temporarily present" are "citizens at birth" under the Citizenship Clause. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred separately on statutory rather than constitutional grounds, writing that Trump's order "does contravene a federal statute" adopted in 1940. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
The case, known as Trump v. Barbara, tested an executive order Trump signed on Jan. 20, 2025, his first day back in office. The order instructed federal agencies to stop issuing citizenship documents 30 days later to babies whose parents were in the country illegally or on temporary visas. Two federal appellate circuits had already upheld injunctions blocking it before the case reached the justices, who heard oral arguments in April with Trump himself in attendance, the first sitting president to watch a Supreme Court argument.
The transgender sports ruling
In the second decision, all nine justices agreed that state bans on transgender women in female school sports do not violate Title IX, the federal civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools. The court split 6-3 along ideological lines on whether the bans violate the 14th Amendment's equal protection guarantee, with the six conservatives holding they do not.
"The Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women's and girls' sports throughout America," Justice Kavanaugh wrote for the majority. The consolidated cases came from Idaho, whose 2020 law was the first of its kind, and West Virginia, where 16-year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson had won an appellate injunction. More than two dozen states have enacted similar bans since Idaho went first.
The reaction
Trump, who watched the citizenship arguments in person in April, called the outcome "too bad" in a Truth Social post and directed Congress to legislate the result he could not get from the court. "No long and unwieldy constitutional amendment is necessary," he wrote. "Congress should today start work on ending expensive, and unfair to our country, birthright citizenship." On the sports ruling, he posted a two-word verdict: "BIG WIN."
White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called the citizenship decision "one of the most destructive and outrageous decisions" in the court's history. "American citizenship is not the birthright of the world," Miller wrote on X. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the court had "finally affirmed that all persons born in the United States are American citizens." Cecillia Wang, the American Civil Liberties Union's national legal director, who argued the case, told MS NOW that "this victory belongs to all of us and to the American people."
The dissents
Justice Alito, dissenting on citizenship, called the ruling a "serious mistake" that "confers citizenship on virtually anyone who happens to be born in this country," including children of women who travel to the United States to give birth and then leave. Justice Thomas wrote separately that the 14th Amendment was being "repurposed for political projects" and that the freed slaves the amendment was written for "were Americans" with no allegiance to other nations. On the sports ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor's partial dissent said the majority had applied "a diminished view of equal protection" to female athletes.
The counterpoint
Advocates for transgender students framed the sports ruling as a targeted harm. Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said the decision "is heartbreaking for transgender student athletes who are being forced to sit on the sidelines simply for who they are." West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey called the same ruling "a victory for common sense." Advocacy groups on both sides were quoted through center-lean wire coverage; partisan outlets were not part of today's dossier.
The court's summer recess begins Wednesday. Trump's call for legislation to end birthright citizenship will land in a Congress already weighing his pending Iran-related funding requests, and any statute Congress passes will almost certainly return to the same nine justices who rejected the executive order Tuesday.