The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., where justices issued rulings on birthright citizenship, biological-sex rules in women’s sports, and federal campaign finance limits. Photo Credit: GETTY IMAGES.
Birthright citizenship remained intact Tuesday after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to deny automatic citizenship to certain children born in the United States, then issued separate rulings clearing state restrictions on transgender athletes in girls’ sports and striking down federal limits on coordinated campaign spending between political parties and their candidates.
The birthright citizenship ruling came in Trump v. Barbara, where the Court reviewed Executive Order No. 14160, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” The order said children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore did not qualify for citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment or the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The Court rejected that position. A five-justice majority led by Chief Justice John Roberts held that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth under the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling affirmed a lower court decision that had blocked enforcement of the executive order and provisionally certified a nationwide class of children who would have been denied citizenship under it.
The outcome was broader than a procedural ruling but not unanimous in its reasoning. Roberts was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed with the judgment against the executive order but said he would have resolved the case on statutory grounds, concluding that the order violated federal citizenship law while disagreeing with the majority’s constitutional holding. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
In a separate decision, the Court ruled that West Virginia and Idaho may enforce laws limiting girls’ and women’s school sports teams based on biological sex. The combined cases, West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, asked whether Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause allow schools to determine eligibility for female sports teams based on biological sex.
Justice Kavanaugh wrote the 6-3 majority opinion, joined by Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Barrett. The Court held that Title IX permits schools to maintain separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex, and that the West Virginia and Idaho laws were substantially related to the states’ asserted interests in safety and competitive fairness. The ruling reversed lower court decisions that had sided with transgender students challenging the laws.
The Court also placed a limit on what it was deciding. Kavanaugh wrote that the cases did not address whether schools may choose to allow transgender girls and women to participate on girls’ and women’s teams, and did not address participation by biological females on male or co-ed teams.
The three liberal justices disagreed in part. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson, argued that additional fact-finding was needed before foreclosing B.P.J.’s Equal Protection challenge, particularly on whether the state had unnecessarily denied an exception. Jackson also wrote separately.
The Court’s third major ruling involved campaign finance. In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, another 6-3 decision written by Kavanaugh, the Court struck down federal limits on how much political parties may spend in coordination with their candidates. The majority held that the Federal Election Campaign Act’s coordinated-expenditure limits violate the First Amendment.
Before the decision, federal law capped coordinated spending by national party committees, with limits varying by office and state. The Court concluded that those limits were no longer justified, pointing to other safeguards such as contribution limits, earmarking rules and public disclosure requirements. The majority also said the 2001 precedent that had upheld the limits, FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, is now overruled to the extent it remained in force.
Kagan dissented, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson. She warned that the decision gives donors a path to send far more money through political parties to cover candidate expenses, reviving corruption risks that campaign finance restrictions were designed to prevent.
Together, the rulings touched three of the most contested areas of American law and politics: who receives citizenship at birth, how schools may structure girls’ and women’s sports, and how far political parties may go in financing campaigns alongside their candidates. The birthright citizenship decision blocked a major immigration policy advanced by the Trump administration, while the sports and campaign finance rulings gave states and political parties greater room to operate with less federal restriction.
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