Supreme Court spurns Trump on birthright citizenship, allows transgender sports bans

• Justices end nine-month term with three major rulings.
• Court allows state bans on transgender student athletes.
• It backs Republican challenge to campaign spending curbs.

The US Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a stinging defeat on Tuesday by rejecting his move to restrict birthright citizenship on the final day of its momentous term, while also letting states ban transgender student athletes from women’s sports teams and striking down more campaign finance limits.

The top US judicial body’s annual term — nine months long — was packed with major rulings, including some big victories for Trump in areas such as presidential powers and immigration as well as losses for him on tariffs, firing 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 in 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 US Constitution’s 14th Amendment that guarantees citizenship to virtually anyone born in the United States, with a few narrow exceptions.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote, adding that the authors of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in the land.

“We keep that promise today,” Roberts wrote.

Trump’s directive instructed federal agencies not to recognise the citizenship of children born in the United States if neither parent is an American citizen or legal permanent resident, also called 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 aftermath of the Civil War that ended slavery in the United States, confers citizenship to those born in the United States who are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” There were narrow exceptions such as the children of foreign diplomats or members of an enemy occupying force.

Ahead of 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 the citizenship status of their newborns.

Transgender sports

The controversy over transgender athletes has become enmeshed in the American culture wars.

Laws in West Virginia and Idaho designate sports teams at public schools, including universities, according to “biological sex” and bar “students of the male sex” 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 assault on the rights of transgender Americans by Trump and various states.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned decisions by lower courts siding with transgender students who challenged the bans in the two states as violating the Constitution and a federal anti-discrimination law.

The court decided 9-0 that the state laws do not violate the Title IX civil rights statute that bars discrimination in education “on the basis of sex.”

The justices divided along ideological lines — with the six conservative justices in the majority — in deciding that the measures also do not violate the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.

“Consistent with Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, we hold that the states may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females. They may determine eligibility for women’s and girls’ sports based on biological sex. The Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women’s and girls’ sports throughout ⁠America,” conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the ruling.

It was the court’s second major ruling against transgender plaintiffs in a span of a year. In a case from Tennessee in June 2025, it let states ban gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender minors.

Campaign finance

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 toward the November midterm elections with a significant cash advantage over their Democratic counterparts.

The ruling was 6-3, powered 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 abridgement of freedom of speech.

A consequential term

The court issued numerous important rulings during its term.

In February, it rejected Trump’s sweeping global tariffs pursued under a law meant for national emergencies.

On Monday, it backed Trump’s firing of a Federal Trade Commission member, expanding his powers over the government while overturning a 1935 precedent that had long curtailed the ability of presidents to fire officials at independent agencies. But it also refused in a separate case to let him immediately fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve Board of Governors member.

The court in April gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in a victory for Republicans. This month, it let Trump’s administration rescind a humanitarian status protecting hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants from deportation, and sided with him over asylum seekers.

The court further expanded gun rights this month. It struck down a Hawaii law restricting 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 bars firearms possession by certain drug users.