Birthright citizenship ruling live updates: Supreme Court rejects Trump’s order | AP News

Live outside the U.S. Supreme Court as it’s set to rule on the constitutionality of President Trump’s order on birthright citizenship declaring that children born to parents who are in country illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.

Trump says Supreme Court ruling on transgender athletes is a ‘big win’

The president has made his opposition to transgender athletes a key feature of his speeches and he embraced the Supreme Court decision that states can ban the athletes from girls and women’s teams.“BIG WIN,” Trump said on social media. “Wow! That takes that ridiculous situation off the table!!!”

Immigrant advocacy group welcomes birthright citizenship ruling

“The Justices rightly recognized that the U.S. Constitution is clear and unambiguous: if you are born in this country and subject to its jurisdiction, you are a citizen of this country,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the head of Global Refuge, a non-profit that works with immigrants, said in a statement. “Birthright citizenship survived the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow, and today, it survived an executive order that would have essentially turned the maternity ward into a customs checkpoint.”

Latino civil rights leaders praise birthright citizenship decision

“Today, the Supreme Court defended the soul of this country and the very definition of what it means to be an American,” Voto Latino President Maria Teresa Kumar said in a statement.She added: “By reaffirming that every child born on American soil is a citizen, the court chose to embrace our multiracial and multicultural reality, rather than succumb to a political agenda rooted in the fear of it.”

Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion upholding birthright citizenship

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, citing congressional debate over the amendment. “We keep that promise today.”

How colonial history helped shape birthright citizenship

Unlike much of the world, birthright citizenship is common across North, Central and South America. Many legal historians believe the roots of that geographic divide reach back more than 500 years, when European nations began sending settlers to their American colonies.Europe’s aristocrat rulers wanted to encourage people to move to the colonies, but those colonists wanted their children — even if born overseas — to hold on to their European citizenship.The practice remained in place as independence movements began to take shape and as independent nations began to emerge.“By then, their legal traditions had already started to form,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University. “So by and large they continued some of the key legal practices of the colonial European governments that they had just severed ties with.”

NAACP president praises Supreme Court decision protecting birthright citizenship

“Trump’s attempted assault on the 14th Amendment was dealt a major blow today. This decision is a powerful affirmation of the Constitution and the enduring promise of equality it represents,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson. “For over 150 years, the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed citizenship to everyone born in this country. Today, the court rightly rejected efforts to undermine that core protection and instead upheld a principle that is essential to our democracy.”

Birthright citizenship opinion is literally weighty, with a printed version that’s especially thick

Many of those pages are from the dissent penned by Justice Thomas and joined by Gorsuch. The majority opinion is 26 pages long, Thomas’s dissent runs to 91 pages.

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

FILE - Hannah Liu, 26, of Washington, holds up a sign in support of birthright citizenship, May 15, 2025, outside of the Supreme Court in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

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

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.’”

FILE - A protester dressed as the Statue of Liberty waves a transgender pride flag outside the Supreme Court in Washington, on Jan. 13, 2026, as it hears arguments over state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)

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.▶ Read more

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.”

JUST IN: Supreme Court strikes down limits on party spending in federal elections, backing Republican appeal

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.