WASHINGTON. The Supreme Court ended its term Tuesday with three landmark decisions, preserving birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment, upholding state bans on transgender athletes competing in girls' and women's sports, and striking down federal limits on coordinated campaign spending between political parties and candidates.

All three decisions split the justices 6-3, though the lineups shifted from case to case. Tuesday marked the final opinion day of the Court's October 2025 term, which included arguments in 58 cases before the justices begin their summer recess.

Birthright Citizenship

Trump signed Executive Order 14160 on Jan. 20, 2025, his first day back in office, directing federal agencies to stop recognizing citizenship for children born more than 30 days after the order's effective date to parents who were in the country illegally or present only temporarily, including those on student, work or tourist visas. The order was blocked by federal courts within days and never took effect.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Barbara that the order is unconstitutional. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett along with the Court's three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

The Court anchored its decision in the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause and the Supreme Court's 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, rejecting the administration's argument that children of parents without permanent legal status fall outside the clause's protection.

The ruling preserves a constitutional guarantee that has stood since the Fourteenth Amendment's ratification in 1868 and that the Supreme Court reaffirmed more than a century ago in Wong Kim Ark. It is also the first time the Court has ruled on the merits of Trump's order, rather than the procedural questions over nationwide injunctions it addressed in a related case last year.

Roberts grounded the ruling in citizenship as the right to have rights, writing that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every person born on American soil and that the Court was keeping it today.

Trump had predicted a loss in the weeks before the ruling, writing on Truth Social that a negative ruling was not economically sustainable for the country. Because the order never took effect, the ruling changes nothing in practice. Anyone born on U.S. soil, with the long-recognized exceptions for children of foreign diplomats and occupying forces, remains a citizen at birth.

Transgender Athletes

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion in the consolidated cases West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Barrett. The Court held that neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause requires schools to open women's and girls' teams to athletes who do not match the biological sex used to define those categories, writing that the Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women's and girls' sports throughout America.

The cases trace back to a 2021 West Virginia law and a 2020 Idaho law requiring student athletes to compete on teams matching their sex at birth. Becky Pepper-Jackson, now 15, of Bridgeport, West Virginia, sued the state in 2021 as a middle schooler after being barred from the school's girls' track and cross-country teams. Lindsay Hecox sought a spot on the women's track and cross-country teams at Boise State University after Idaho's law took effect.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, breaking with the majority on equal protection grounds while agreeing that Title IX permits sex-based eligibility rules for school sports. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson filed a separate opinion taking the same partial position.

The ruling directly governs only West Virginia and Idaho, but more than two dozen other states have passed similar bans since 2020, and those laws are now expected to stand on the same legal footing.

Campaign Finance

In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the Court ruled 6-3 along its typical ideological lines, with Justice Kavanaugh again writing for the majority, that federal limits on coordinated spending between political parties and their candidates violate the First Amendment. The Court's three liberal justices dissented. Kavanaugh wrote that the decision treats all political parties equally.

The challenge was filed in 2022 by then-Senate candidate JD Vance, then-Rep. Steve Chabot of Ohio and two national Republican committees, arguing that federal limits on how much political parties may spend in coordination with their own candidates violate the First Amendment. The caps ranged as high as nearly $4 million for some Senate races. The Federal Election Commission dropped its defense of the law after Trump took office for his second term. Democratic lawyers intervened to defend the limits, warning in court filings that unlimited coordinated spending would invite corruption, writing that the potential for actual or apparent corruption is obvious.

The ruling extends a line of decisions since the Court's 2010 Citizens United case that have steadily loosened campaign finance regulation.

Tuesday's rulings cap a term in which the Court also weighed in on the limits of presidential power, striking down Trump's global tariff program in February for exceeding the authority Congress had granted him, while separately narrowing the Voting Rights Act in a Louisiana redistricting case, loosening immigration rules for lawful permanent residents seeking to reenter the country, and ruling that states may count mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.

Together, the decisions reflect a term in which the justices repeatedly shaped the boundaries of executive power, elections and immigration law.

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