The U.S. Supreme Court issued rulings on birthright citizenship and on bans targeting transgender athletes on the court's final day of the term.
The court upheld the principle that almost all people born on U.S. soil are American in the case that had challenged President Trump's executive order directing federal agencies to deny citizenship to children whose parents entered the country illegally or were in the country on temporary visas; the American Civil Liberties Union and its partners filed a class-action suit, Barbara v Trump, to challenge the order.
The 14th Amendment provides, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside," and the amendment was added to the charter in 1868. During oral arguments in April, Justice Elena Kagan said, "What the 14th Amendment did was accept that tradition and not attempt to put any limitations on it. That was the clear rationale."
The court also allowed state bans that prohibit transgender athletes from competing in girls' and women's sports, resolving cases that came from Idaho and West Virginia and that challenged laws requiring public school and college sports teams to compete according to the sex recorded at birth; more than two dozen states have similar bans.
At arguments in January, at least five justices appeared to favor upholding those bans, and the court has a 6-3 conservative majority, a configuration observers cited as a factor in how broadly a ruling could reach.
The court struck down longtime campaign finance restrictions in a separate decision, a 6-3 ruling authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh that removed limits on how much a national political party committee can spend in coordination with individual candidates. The challenge was brought by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the campaigns of Vice President JD Vance and then-Rep. Steve Chabot; the Federal Election Commission under the Trump administration had sided with the challengers. Republicans' House and Senate campaign committees celebrated the ruling in a joint statement by Rep. Richard Hudson and Sen. Tim Scott, who said the decision made clear that "the federal government has no authority to place arbitrary limits on how political parties support the candidates they nominate." The Democratic National Committee and the party's House and Senate campaign committees, represented by DNC Chair Ken Martin, Rep. Suzan DelBene and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, called the ruling "a win for billionaire donors and special interests." Under the law struck down, parties could make unlimited independent expenditures but were barred from exceeding caps on coordinated spending that vary by race and can be as much as almost $4 million for Senate contests and $127,000 for at-large House seats.
Legal observers have noted the difference between a sweeping constitutional ruling and a narrower statutory decision, and the court's opinions could set a nationwide precedent for how civil rights protections apply to transgender students.
Separately, delegations from the United States and Iran traveled to Qatar after recent exchanges of attacks; President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff were reported to be heading to Doha for talks, Iranian officials said they would not meet them, and a memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran included the release of approximately $6 billion in frozen assets.