The Supreme Court closed its term with a split-screen civil rights ruling day: it rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship while allowing states to ban transgender students from girls’ and women’s sports teams.
The decisions, both issued June 30, put two constitutional fights on sharply different tracks. In Trump v. Barbara, the Court struck down Trump’s 2025 executive order that sought to deny citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who are undocumented or temporarily present. In West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, the Court upheld Idaho and West Virginia laws that bar transgender girls and women from competing on girls’ and women’s school sports teams.
Together, the rulings show a Court willing to block one of the president’s most sweeping immigration claims while accepting state laws that civil rights groups say will deepen discrimination against transgender youth.
The birthright citizenship case centered on the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War. The text says, “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.”
Trump’s executive order attempted to narrow that guarantee. It declared that children born in the United States to parents who were unlawfully or temporarily present were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore were not citizens under the 14th Amendment or the Immigration and Nationality Act. Lower courts blocked the order before it took effect.
The Supreme Court rejected the order by a 6 to 3 vote. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the controlling constitutional opinion for five justices, joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the Court’s three liberal justices. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that the order could not stand, but he relied on federal statute rather than the Constitution. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
For immigrant families, the decision preserved a rule that has shaped American life for more than a century: nearly everyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen, with narrow exceptions such as children of foreign diplomats or occupying enemy forces. The Associated Press reported that more than a quarter of a million babies born in the United States each year would have been affected by Trump’s order, according to research by the Migration Policy Institute and Pennsylvania State University’s Population Research Institute.
The ruling also limited one of Trump’s most aggressive claims of executive power. His order did not merely reinterpret an agency policy or redirect enforcement priorities. It tried to change who belongs to the political community at birth.
Civil rights groups that challenged the order framed the decision as a defense of constitutional citizenship against presidential overreach. The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented plaintiffs with partner groups, said the ruling reaffirmed that birthright citizenship cannot be rewritten by executive action.
The second set of cases reached a different result for transgender students. Idaho and West Virginia argued that their laws protect equal opportunity and competitive fairness for cisgender girls and women. The students who challenged the bans argued that excluding them violated Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The Court sided with the states. It ruled unanimously that the state laws do not violate Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bars sex discrimination in education programs receiving federal funds. On equal protection, the justices divided along ideological lines, with the six conservative justices allowing the bans and the three liberal justices saying the West Virginia case should not have been resolved without more factual development.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion in the sports cases. The opinion said schools may determine eligibility for girls’ and women’s sports based on what the Court called biological sex. After asking whether schools may maintain girls’ and women’s sports for biological females under Title IX and equal protection, Kavanaugh wrote, “The answer is yes.”
The ruling gives legal support to a wave of state laws passed since 2020. According to the Court’s own summary, 27 states have enacted laws restricting participation in girls’ and women’s sports based on sex assigned at birth or state definitions of sex. Reuters reported that 25 other states have laws similar to Idaho and West Virginia on the books.
For transgender students, the ruling means exclusion can now be upheld even when a student has already been living, studying, and competing as a girl or woman. In West Virginia, the case was brought by Becky Pepper-Jackson, a transgender student who sought to participate in girls’ cross-country and track and field. In Idaho, Lindsay Hecox challenged a law after seeking to compete at Boise State University.
Advocates for the students said the decision turns sports into another front in a wider legal campaign against transgender people. Lambda Legal and the ACLU said the decision upheld categorical bans despite the students’ claims that the laws denied them equal opportunity.
“This is a heartbreaking ruling for our clients and transgender girls like them who’ve asked for nothing more than the same opportunities afforded to their peers,” said Joshua Block, senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined in part by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, warned that the Court moved too quickly past unresolved facts. Her opinion focused on whether West Virginia could justify applying its ban to a transgender girl who, according to her lawyers, had not experienced endogenous puberty and was receiving gender-affirming treatment. Sotomayor said equal protection demands individual treatment rather than broad assumptions about sex and ability.
That divide is the heart of the day’s civil rights split. On birthright citizenship, the Court blocked an executive order that would have made citizenship depend on a parent’s immigration status. On transgender sports, the Court allowed states to impose categorical rules that determine who may participate based on sex classifications set by lawmakers.
The rulings also show the uneven reach of the 14th Amendment in the current Court. In one case, the amendment’s citizenship guarantee survived a direct attack from the president. In the other, the amendment’s equal protection guarantee did not stop states from excluding transgender students from school teams that match their gender identity.
For families affected by Trump’s order, the citizenship ruling brings immediate certainty. For transgender students, the sports ruling leaves a far different legal landscape, one in which state lawmakers have wide authority to restrict participation. The Court said its decision does not decide whether schools may allow transgender girls and women to participate on girls’ and women’s teams in states or districts that choose a different policy. But for states with bans already in place, the ruling gives those laws a clear path forward.
The two decisions will now move into different political arenas. Trump and his allies may continue to seek ways to attack birthright citizenship, but the constitutional ruling leaves little room for ordinary legislation to undo it. Transgender rights advocates, by contrast, face a Court that has now upheld major restrictions on transgender youth in both health care and school sports.
For now, the clearest line the Court drew was between citizenship at birth and equal participation at school. One guarantee survived. Another group of students was left outside the gate.
As Roberts wrote for the Court in the birthright citizenship case, “Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth.”
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