Supreme Court work goes on with 16 cases to decide, including birthright
citizenship
[June 19, 2025]
By MARK SHERMAN and LINDSAY WHITEHURST
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is in the homestretch of a term that
has lately been dominated by the Trump administration's emergency
appeals of lower court orders seeking to slow President Donald Trump's
efforts to remake the federal government.
But the justices also have 16 cases to resolve that were argued between
December and mid-May. One of the argued cases was an emergency appeal,
the administration's bid to be allowed to enforce Trump's executive
order denying birthright citizenship to U.S.-born children of parents
who are in the country illegally.
The court typically aims to finish its work by the end of June. On
Wednesday it decided one of its most closely watched cases, handing down
an opinion that upheld a Tennessee ban on some healthcare for
transgender minors.
Here are some of the biggest remaining cases:
Trump's birthright citizenship order has been blocked by lower courts
The court rarely hears arguments over emergency appeals, but it took up
the administration's plea to narrow orders that have prevented the
citizenship changes from taking effect anywhere in the U.S.
The issue before the justices is whether to limit the authority of
judges to issue nationwide injunctions, which have plagued both
Republican and Democratic administrations in the past 10 years.
These nationwide court orders have emerged as an important check on
Trump’s efforts and a source of mounting frustration to the Republican
president and his allies.
At arguments last month, the court seemed intent on keeping a block on
the citizenship restrictions while still looking for a way to scale back
nationwide court orders. It was not clear what such a decision might
look like, but a majority of the court expressed concerns about what
would happen if the administration were allowed, even temporarily, to
deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the country
illegally.
Democratic-led states, immigrants and rights groups who sued over
Trump's executive order argued that it would upset the settled
understanding of birthright citizenship that has existed for more than
125 years.
The court seems likely to side with Maryland parents in a religious
rights case over LGBTQ storybooks in public schools
Parents in the Montgomery County school system, in suburban Washington,
want to be able to pull their children out of lessons that use the
storybooks, which the county added to the curriculum to better reflect
the district's diversity.
The school system at one point allowed parents to remove their children
from those lessons, but then reversed course because it found the
opt-out policy to be disruptive. Sex education is the only area of
instruction with an opt-out provision in the county's schools.
The school district introduced the storybooks in 2022, with such titles
as “Prince and Knight” and “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding.”
The case is one of several religious rights cases at the court this
term. The justices have repeatedly endorsed claims of religious
discrimination in recent years. The decision also comes amid increases
in recent years in books being banned from public school and public
libraries.
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The Supreme Court is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington, Dec. 17,
2024. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
A three-year battle over congressional districts in Louisiana is
making its second trip to the Supreme Court
Lower courts have struck down two Louisiana congressional maps since
2022 and the justices are weighing whether to send state lawmakers
back to the map-drawing board for a third time.
The case involves the interplay between race and politics in drawing
political boundaries in front of a conservative-led court that has
been skeptical of considerations of race in public life.
At arguments in March, several of the court’s conservative justices
suggested they could vote to throw out the map and make it harder,
if not impossible, to bring redistricting lawsuits under the Voting
Rights Act.
Before the court now is a map that created a second Black majority
congressional district among Louisiana's six seats in the House of
Representatives. The district elected a Black Democrat in 2024.
A three-judge court found that the state relied too heavily on race
in drawing the district, rejecting Louisiana's arguments that
politics predominated, specifically the preservation of the seats of
influential members of Congress, including Speaker Mike Johnson. The
Supreme Court ordered the challenged map to be used last year while
the case went on.
Lawmakers only drew that map after civil rights advocates won a
court ruling that a map with one Black majority district likely
violated the landmark voting rights law.
The justices are weighing a Texas law aimed at blocking kids from
seeing online pornography
Texas is among more than a dozen states with age verification laws.
The states argue the laws are necessary as smartphones have made
access to online porn, including hardcore obscene material, almost
instantaneous.
The question for the court is whether the measure infringes on the
constitutional rights of adults as well. The Free Speech Coalition,
an adult-entertainment industry trade group, agrees that children
shouldn't be seeing pornography. But it says the Texas law is
written too broadly and wrongly affects adults by requiring them to
submit personal identifying information online that is vulnerable to
hacking or tracking.
The justices appeared open to upholding the law, though they also
could return it to a lower court for additional work. Some justices
worried the lower court hadn’t applied a strict enough legal
standard in determining whether the Texas law and others like that
could run afoul of the First Amendment.
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