Supreme Court strikes down some Trump priorities, but expands presidential power

WASHINGTON (OSV News) — The U.S. Supreme Court ended its 2025-2026 term with major rulings striking down President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship, and upholding West Virginia and Idaho state laws requiring student athletes to compete on sports teams that correspond to their biological sex rather than their self-identified gender.

The rulings followed other key decisions issued by the high court the same term rejecting Trump’s sweeping tariff policy, but upholding the president’s firings of the heads of independent federal agencies, with a significant exception: the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank. Those rulings effectively expanded presidential power in federal agencies.

“This term confirmed that, at present, the court is the best functioning branch of our national government, and that the justices are not, as some critics charge, merely political actors aligned with the current administration,” Richard Garnett, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, told OSV News.

In the birthright citizenship case, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship violated the 14th Amendment.

Garnett said the result in the birthright citizenship case “was expected, although many expected that the ruling would be more narrow, and focused primarily on the relevant federal statute.”

“It is important to appreciate that everyone agrees that the Constitution generally provides birthright citizenship; the question was about the specific exceptions to that general rule,” he said. “Also, Americans should understand that, contrary to many press reports, nearly all the justices agreed that many children born to people unlawfully present in the United States are still citizens. So, the feverish attacks on the majority for dramatically transforming American policy are mistaken. The majority affirmed what has long been the consensus understanding, affirmed the relevant Supreme Court precedent, and followed the relevant federal statute.”

Ashley Feasley, the legal expert in residence at the Immigration Law and Policy Initiative at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law, told OSV News that Roberts’ birthright citizenship opinion is the type of “very rich on a textualist, historical-focused and originalist argument” that has emerged among those seen as judicial conservatives at the Supreme Court.

“It’s very detailed, and he got the majority votes in doing it, and he seems, I would say, very determined to put the issue to bed,” Feasley said.

However, in his own opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that he disagrees with the court’s finding that the order violates the 14th Amendment, but he joined the majority in striking it down. Kavanaugh instead argued he did so on the basis that Trump’s birthright citizenship order violated a federal statute governing birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. The statute in question specifies particular circumstances under which citizenship is granted at birth in accordance with that amendment.

“I think his argument about the statutory piece is kind of interesting, in the sense that he could be offering a different interpretation,” Feasley said. But she noted that Kavanaugh “did not have another justice with him when he articulated that, and the bar would be very high for Congressional action.”

“But that is certainly something that, for those who’ve watched the Supreme Court, was something to notice,” she said.

Garnett added, “The outrage among some supporters of the president’s order, which went beyond his executive authority, is misplaced. And, the ruling leaves it open to Congress to change immigration policy by statute, or for the American people to amend the Constitution.”

Other major rulings issued in the final days of the 2025-2026 term had to do with immigration policy. In a pair of rulings issued June 25, the high court ruled that the Trump administration can reimplement a policy of turning away asylum-seekers along the U.S.-Mexico border before they enter the country, known as “metering,” and that it can end a temporary designation shielding eligible Haitian and Syrian immigrants living in the U.S. from deportation.

The U.S. Supreme Court rarely grants requests to delay an execution. But in other notable cases from its most recent term, it issued rulings that effectively sided with three inmates whose cases included factors like intellectual disabilities or allegations of racial bias.

Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, executive director of Catholic Mobilizing Network, a group that advocates for the abolition of capital punishment in line with Catholic teaching, told OSV News, “We have seen several instances where the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the defendants. The merits of these cases led to enforcing some of the guardrails that are in place at our highest court to protect life.”

The death penalty remains legal at the federal level, but Vaillancourt Murphy pointed to a polling dip in public perception of the practice.

Vaillancourt Murphy said that although “there has been an uptick in state executions in places such as Florida, it is still fair to say that the country on the whole is decidedly moving away from the death penalty. Just recently, the Republican governor in Ohio came out publicly critical of the death penalty and talked about abolishing it.”

“Gratefully, there are fewer death sentences each year,” she said. “The future of the death penalty will largely fall on the American public, and luckily, the public has been trending toward refusing to tolerate this system of death that is beyond repair.”

The Supreme Court is expected to begin its 2026-2027 term in October.

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