The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.

The decision, in line with the longstanding judicial interpretation of the 14th Amendment, comes on the final day of a Supreme Court term that has centered on Trump’s expansive claims of presidential power — and largely ruled in his favor.

In its other Tuesday rulings, the court upheld laws in roughly half the states that prohibit transgender girls and women from playing on their public school and college sport teams and struck down limits on party spending in federal elections.

Here’s the latest:

Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship, rejecting Trump’s proposed limits

In upholding a broad conception of birthright citizenship, the court rejected President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.

The justices relied on a long-settled understanding of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, and more recent federal laws in ruling that anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions, is a citizen.

The Republican president’s restrictions had been blocked by several lower courts and had not taken effect anywhere in the U.S.

During arguments in April, both conservative and liberal justices questioned the order’s legality in a momentous case that was magnified by Trump’s unprecedented attendance in the courtroom.

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Advocates for LGBTQ+ youth condemn the transgender athletes ruling

“Today’s news has nothing to do with safety or fairness in sports,” Trevor Project CEO Jaymes Black said in a statement. “These rulings only serve to send a message to transgender and nonbinary young people that says, ‘you don’t belong.’”

Supreme Court strikes down limits on party spending in federal elections

The Supreme Court on Tuesday erased limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for Congress and president, striking down a federal election law that’s more than 50 years old.

Prodded by a Republican-led lawsuit that includes Vice President JD Vance, the court’s conservative justices were again in the majority of the latest decision that upended congressionally enacted limits on raising and spending money to influence elections. The court’s 2010 Citizens United decision opened the door to unlimited independent spending in federal elections.

The limits on party spending stem from a desire to prevent large donors from skirting caps on individual contributions to a candidate by directing unlimited sums to the party, with the understanding that the money will be spent on behalf of the candidate.

The Supreme Court had previously upheld the limits in 2001.

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One advocate for transgender rights says Tuesday’s ruling will resonate in areas beyond sports

“The Supreme Court gave cover to a campaign whose stated goal is to deny constitutional projections to trans people,” Imara Jones, CEO of TransLash Media, said in a statement. “The ultimate objective is to establish the cocktail of laws and systemic marginalization that will allow those in power to exclude larger and larger groups of Americans.”

From Justice Brett Kavanaugh on the transgender athletes ruling

“Sports are generally zero sum,” Kavanaugh said in the majority opinion. “Every biological male who makes the team takes a roster spot from a female athlete. Every biological male who earns playing time reduces the playing time of a female athlete. Every biological male who starts takes a starting position from a female athlete. Every biological male who wins a race takes the gold medal away from a female athlete.”

Supreme Court upholds state laws banning transgender girls and women from school athletic teams

The ruling is another setback for transgender people.

The court’s conservative majority, which has repeatedly ruled against transgender Americans in the past year, ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution or the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.

More than two dozen other Republican-led states have adopted bans on female transgender athletes, and the decision seems certain to extend to them as well.

Left unresolved by the outcome are lawsuits challenging state laws and regulations in Connecticut, California and elsewhere that permit transgender athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity.

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Several courts have blocked the citizenship restrictions

The justices are weighing Trump’s appeal of a lower-court ruling from New Hampshire that struck down the citizenship restrictions, one of several courts that have blocked them.

Trump signed the birthright citizenship order on the first day of his second term, but the restrictions have not taken effect anywhere in the country.

Dueling views on birthright citizenship

In oral arguments, Sauer, the lawyer for Trump’s administration, said that birthright citizenship encourages illegal immigration and “rewards illegal aliens who not only violate the immigration laws but also jump in front of those who follow the rules.”

The practice “demeans the priceless and profound gift of American citizenship,” he told the court.

But the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging Trump’s order, sees it very differently.

“It’s one of the clearest statements of who we are as a country,” the ACLU said in a statement. “No matter who your parents are, if you’re born here, you belong here.”

America’s views on birthright citizenship

Most Americans say they believe in birthright citizenship, though many are conflicted about exactly who it should apply to.

An April survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research of more than 2,500 U.S. adults found that about two-thirds say children born in the U.S. should get automatic citizenship. That number drops to 44% for Republicans.

But the poll also showed ambivalence when it came to specifics.

For example, 75% of U.S. adults support automatic citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents in the country on work visas. Only about half, though, believe in it for children born to parents who are illegally in the country.

The court ruled Monday that states can count late-arriving mailed ballots

The 5-4 decision rejected a Republican-led attack on laws in more than half the states and the District of Columbia that permit mailed ballots to arrive and be counted some number of days after the election, provided they are postmarked by Election Day.

The outcome spares officials the headache of changing their ballot rules just a few months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections.

In just over half of those states, the more forgiving deadlines apply only to ballots cast by military and overseas voters.

The government has faced judicial skepticism

During oral arguments, even many conservative justices appeared unconvinced by the government’s case.

“I can imagine it being messy in some applications,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, asking Solicitor General D. John Sauer about the issue of abandoned infants.

“What if you don’t know who the parents are?” she asked.

Sauer started to say that question was addressed in the U.S. code, but Barrett quickly interrupted him.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about the Constitution?” she asked.

How do most countries decide a child’s citizenship?

Outside of the Americas, most countries follow the legal principle of jus sanguinis, or “right of blood,” with a child’s citizenship inherited from its parents, no matter the place of birth.

In the European Union, for example, no member states grant automatic, unconditional citizenship to children born to foreigners.

But American legal practice is descended in many ways from English common law, which had long provided for citizenship based on a child’s place of birth, the legal concept of jus soli, or “right of soil.”

The UK, though, abandoned jus soli with the British Nationality Act of 1981.

Under the new rules, people born in the UK get citizenship only if at least one parent is a British citizen or has “settled status” under the law.

The justices will read summaries of their opinions

The court will dive right into the remaining decisions when the justices take the bench at 10 a.m. ET.

The opinions are typically read in ascending order of seniority so that the most junior justice with an opinion goes first. Chief Justice John Roberts, who may well have the decision in the birthright citizenship case, would go last.

Monday’s ruling on federal agencies dramatically expanded presidential power

Other than at the Federal Reserve, with its role of setting interest rates, the court held that presidents have free rein to fire agency heads at will, despite federal laws that require a cause for such dismissals and a 91-year-old decision that had limited executive authority.

The justices allowed Fed governor Lisa Cook to stay in her job while she fights Trump’s effort to fire her over allegations of mortgage fraud, which she has denied.

With the six conservative justices in the majority, the nine-member court jettisoned its unanimous decision in Humphrey’s Executor that had limited when presidents can fire agencies’ board members — in part to try to ensure decision-making free of political influence.

“We hold that such protection from removal is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.

The court will also rule on trans athletes and campaign finances

In separate cases, the court will also decide:

Whether states can prohibit transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s public school and college teams.

Whether to uphold a federal law more than 50 years old limiting how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for Congress and the president.

The court seemed poised to reject Trump’s birthright citizenship limits during arguments in April

Oral arguments for the case lasted more than two hours in a crowded courtroom that included Trump, the first sitting president to attend arguments at the nation’s highest court, and, in seats reserved for the justices’ guests, actor Robert De Niro.

Trump heard his administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, face one skeptical question after another. Justices asked about the legal basis for the order and voiced more practical concerns.

“Is this happening in the delivery room?” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked, drilling down into the logistics of how the government would actually figure out who is entitled to citizenship and who is not.

Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that Sauer was relying on quirky exceptions to citizenship to make a broad argument about people who are in the country illegally. “I’m not quite sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples,” Roberts said.

Justice Clarence Thomas sounded the most likely among the nine justices to side with Trump.

Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, who prosecuted ex-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick for racketeering, accuses the Trump administration of adopting many of the same corrupt practices.

She’s the author of a new book, “The Fix: Saving America From the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government.”

McQuade says there are ways to rein-in the worst impulses of federal officials.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

Barbara McQuade: One of the lessons of this second Trump administration is how important it is to have three vigorous branches of government. I think the courts have largely done their part. But Congress has really just kind of rolled over. We’ve had the president encroach upon their power of the purse when he said he wasn’t going to fund things that they had already appropriated funds for. He violated the powers to levy taxes when he imposed tariffs. And now he’s violating the right of Congress to declare war.

So, I think we need a better system of electing our members of Congress. And there are a few ideas for doing that. One is ranked choice voting. That exists in a few parts of the country and I think has a tendency to weed out extremists.

We need to get our arms around gerrymandering. Michigan has been a real leader in this regard with our citizen-based redistricting through an independent committee. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that it is powerless to prevent political gerrymandering. They say it’s part of the political process, a political question that courts can’t stop. Of course, Justice Elena Kagan dissented from that Supreme Court opinion in the case Rucho v. Common Cause, saying it was antithetical to democracy to let somebody put their thumb on the scale like that.

But I think there are other things we need to do as well. We have seen, in my opinion, terrible abuse of the U.S. Department of Justice. The Justice Department was created by an act of Congress. For that reason, I think Congress could probably also add some conditions to how the Justice Department wields its power. They could make it much more difficult for a president to change what Justice does with just a stroke of a pen. And they could make it much harder to do that under the radar. There’s also a policy that restricts communications between the White House and the Justice Department. I think we could put some conditions on that to improve transparency, such as requiring that those actions be reported to the inspector general.

Quinn Klinefelter, WDET News: Justice is supposed to be an independent agency. Yet you often hear people say that, depending on which kind of administration is in place, they’re gonna ask Justice officials to focus on particular issues or individuals. When you were a U.S. attorney, did you get any of that? Don’t look at these cases as much because we really want you to focus on something or someone else?

BM: What was always normal during the time I was U.S. attorney in the Obama administration, as well as during the 12 years I was an assistant U.S. attorney under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the presidents would set broad priorities. They might say, “We are interested in pursuing violent crime,” for example. When Obama came into office, that administration was interested in pursuing mortgage fraud. But they weren’t directing you to focus on any particular case. They allowed you to follow the facts and the law. They just said, “This is a serious problem. We’re going to fund positions to pursue this particular problem and we would like you to investigate in this area.” But they were not directing you to charge any one individual. And I think that’s what’s so different about this moment, where we see the president directing the attorney general to investigate individuals by name for vague allegations of criminal behavior. That is what I think most people consider “weaponization,” as opposed to independence.

QK: It does sound very similar to “mob-like” tactics.

BM: It most certainly does. When I I first started writing this book about a year-and-a-half ago, I thought maybe it was a little out there to compare the president to a mob. But all that we’ve seen has only fulfilled my thesis that the tactics he uses are similar to the mob.

I think he learned them from Roy Cohn, the lawyer who represented Donald Trump and his father in the 1970’s, when they were sued by the Justice Department for race discrimination in housing. Roy Cohn was a lawyer for the mafia. He was a lawyer for Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare. He learned that the best defense is a good offense. Turn the tables on your accusers, admit nothing, deny everything, and accuse them of things like Trump Derangement Syndrome or “lawfare” or “fake news” if they criticize you. All of that, I think, are tactics he learned from Roy Cohn, who learned it from the mob.

The Trump administration has cracked down on immigration. President Donald Trump has conducted more ICE raids, signaled tougher security at the border, and has prevented fewer legal immigrants from entering the country. 

The Trump administration is also trying to end humanitarian immigration programs. One of those is Temporary Protected Status or TPS. 

The administration has revoked deportation protections from about one million people in the U.S. Most of them are from Venezuela and Honduras. It’s trying to revoke TPS from other countries but the courts have blocked the attempt.

The Department of Homeland Security says many countries on the TPS list are no longer in crisis. But many representing immigrants in court say otherwise.

Megan Hauptman is a Litigation Staff Attorney for the International Refugee Assistance Project. She is fighting the Trump administration to keep TPS for over 6,000 people from Syria. Over 1,500 of them live in Michigan alone. 

What exactly is TPS status? And what would happen if more people were to lose it? Megan Hauptman spoke with The Metro‘s Robyn Vincent about this and more.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.

Subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

More stories from The Metro

Inquiries for new electric vehicles has risen more than a quarter since America and Israel’s war in Iran began. But EVs need to be charged — and that’s easier to do in some places.

If you’re in China, you can charge an EV in just a few minutes. In Michigan, we’re way behind that reality.

But despite the Trump administration’s distaste for EVs, the infrastructure for electricity is improving. The number of charging ports in the state grew by about 1,800 last year — the most significant uptick in one year. 

So, if you’re thinking about buying or leasing an EV, what does all this mean for you?

Sophia Schuster is the policy principal for the Michigan Energy Innovation Business Council. She spoke with Host Robyn Vincent.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.

Subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

More stories from The Metro

The State of Michigan and the City of Romulus have sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to stop them from converting a warehouse into an ICE detention center.

This week on MichMash, Gongwer News Service’s Alethia Kasben talks with Attorney General Dana Nessel to discuss her concerns about the department’s actions and much more.

Subscribe to MichMash on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

In this episode

• Why did the State of Michigan and the City of Romulus sue the U.S. Department of Homeland Security?
• Attorney General Nessel’s take on Pres. Trump attending Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship.
• Data centers in Michigan
• What Attorney Nessel plans to do after leaving office this term. 

Nessel felt that the legality of the Romulus warehouse purchase was in question, and even pointed out the irony of the DHS operation.

“They are taking people who mostly have no criminal records of any kinds and [saying] that these people didn’t come into the state properly so we are going to detain you or deport. Well, DHS didn’t come in to Romulus properly. They are not abiding by the laws. So I think it’s a bit of hypocrisy by the federal government.” 

Nessel said they filed a preliminary injunction so that DHS could not proceed with the project while the legal battle evolves. 

More from WDET:

• Detroit Evening Report: Michigan and city of Romulus file lawsuit to halt ICE detention center

• The Metro: Data centers, coming to a community near you