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In which I comment on the Supreme Court decisions

In which I comment on the Supreme Court decisions

Last updated on: June 30, 2026 at 8:30 pm by Jane the Actuary

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In which I comment on the Supreme Court decisions 2026-06-30T20:30:35-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panorama_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_Building_at_Dusk.jpg; Joe Ravi [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Lots of big Supreme Court decisions issued in the past couple days, and, yes, for convenience, I cheated and asked Grok for a quick summary, which it provided with references. I have not read all the details, and the purpose of this post is a quick review, as much for myself as for readers.

Trump v. Barbara, birthright citizenship. The court ruled that, yes, the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause is to be interpreted expansively. Was this a given? I wasn’t particularly surprised; although I’d read statements that seemed credible to me that the amendment was vague on what it means to be under the “jurisdiction” of the U.S. such that Indians were not automatically citizens, and that the finer points of implementation were left to Congress, but Trump’s wholesale attempt to end birthright citizenship for both birth tourists and illegal immigrants was far too much for the court to swallow. Would the outcome have been different if Trump had focused only on birth tourists, and children who, by means of returning to their home countries, were clearly no longer “under the jurisdiction” of the US? Is there still room for an effort to put an end to birth tourism by means of forced expatriation/denationalization for citizens-by-birth who upon reaching adulthood have no real ties to the US and, worse, have clear loyalties elsewhere (at its most extreme, Chinese citizens serving in their military)? That path (paired with no longer giving parents-of-citizens a “pass” with nonenforcement of illegal stay) seems more reasonable than an alternative of aggressive measures to ensure pregnant women can’t enter the country.

West Virginia v B.PJ/Little v. Hecox. I was glad to see this ruling, though I still need to understand it more thoroughly. The fundamental premise is that two transgirls/transgender-identifying boys had sued WV and Idaho, respectively, over their “protect girls’ sports” laws. As I understand it, the students had claimed that, by not permitting them on girls’ teams, the state was violating Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the constitution, but the ruling stated that, indeed, Title IX protects the rights of biological girls to play on teams constituted of biological girls for the sake of fair competition, and the true differences between boys and girls (and the fact that even trans-identifying boys who have had puberty suppressed, have physiological advantages over biological girls) mean there is no Equal Protection claim. In some respects this was a 6-3 ruling, in other parts of the case a 9-0 outcome.

What was surprising to me is that the ruling found that Title IX indeed protected girls – yet still left the ultimate decisions to the states, permitting each state to decide for itself whether girls may have girl-only teams or not. That’s an improvement over the alternative outcome that no state could keep biological distinctions, but still means that girls in half of US states do not have protections. It’s not clear to me to what extent this is simply a matter of what the court was asked to decide — that is, the plaintiffs were students in states with “girls’ sports protection” laws, rather than girls in states like Illinois where there is no protection. Could a girl in Illinois now file suit to say that she has been denied Title IX protections because girls’ teams don’t have fair competition? Would it be necessary for there to be a particular student on the team who was creating the unfair competition, rather than a law that enables that unfairness?

Mullin v. Doe, Allowing the Trump administration to carry out TPS terminations.

Is Haiti a bad place? Yes. Does that mean that the United States should simply open its borders to all Haitians? No. What’s particularly disturbing about the Haiti TPS is that the original “true” TPS holders, that is, the longtime residents who arrived here after the 2010 earthquake, are only a small minority of the overall number of Haitian TPS designees. The largest number (and I’m still getting this from Grok) is 75 – 85% who benefitted from the Biden re-designation, including large numbers who came as a result of Biden’s CHNV “parole” program and/or had lived in Brazil or Chile previously but came to the US because of economic opportunities. The numbers aren’t precise, but something like 100 – 200K were literally flown in rather than having been given TPS to regularize an existing illegal residence, and somewhere between tens and hundreds of thousands had been living in Brazil/Chile. Is it possible to negotiate a migration of those Haitians back to those or other Latin American countries, to mitigate the worst of the harms of the removal of TPS status? I hope so. But either way, based simply on the law itself, the decision was obvious – the TPS law gives the president the authority to designate, and choose not to renew a designation of TPS.

And, yes, Syria is even clearer — the war in Syria is over.

What is not now clear is what happens next. When their status ends, will their otherwise-legitimate law-abiding employers (hospitals employing them as CNAs, poultry-processing plants, etc.) terminate them, or keep them on the payroll until the government implements enforcement measures?

The other key immigration case, Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, was even clearer – that if a US law lays out a process for seeking asylum that requires you be on US territory, then, a would-be asylum claimant cannot use inability to cross to the US as grounds for claiming asylum next to the border instead.

So there you have it – some quick comments even though blogging-time always seems to escape me!

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