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Supreme Court Issues Final Rulings for This Year’s Term: 6 Takeaways

by Jack Philips, The EPOCH Times.com, June 27, 2025

The U.S. Supreme Court released the final orders scheduled for the 2024–2025 term before the nine justices go on their summer break, including rulings on birthright citizenship and nationwide injunctions, Obamacare, online age verification, LGBT-related books in schools, and a federal internet subsidy program.

The justices will now go on their scheduled break and will take up cases again in the fall.
 

Court Ends Nationwide Injunctions, Birthright Citizenship

On President Donald Trump’s January order that would deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of people who are in the country illegally, the Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not let the policy go into effect immediately and did not address whether the policy violated the Constitution. The order granted a Trump administration request to narrow the scope of several nationwide injunctions issued by federal judges earlier this year that halted enforcement of the measure.
 

The Supreme Court's Friday ruling narrowing the scope of judicial injunctions also included a scathing rebuke of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, asserting she sought an "imperial judiciary" and that her views ran afoul of more than 200 years of precedent.

"We will not dwell on JUSTICE JACKSON’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary," wrote Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

"JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by
law.” Ibid. That goes for judges too," she added.

The high court decision, which opens an avenue for the Trump administration to take steps to implement its earlier order to end automatic birthright citizenship, was hailed by the president in a post on his Truth Social media network as a “GIANT WIN.”

“Even the Birthright Citizenship Hoax has been, indirectly, hit hard. It had to do with the babies of slaves (same year!), not the SCAMMING of our Immigration process,” Trump said in his Friday post, referring to arguments that were made by his administration regarding the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Reacting to the order on Friday, Attorney General Pam Bondi also wrote in a post on X that the Supreme Court “instructed district courts to STOP the endless barrage of nationwide injunctions against President Trump.” After the order, she said, her office “will continue to zealously defend [Trump’s] policies and his authority to implement them.

SCOTUS Hands Big Immigration Win to Trump Administration

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court has issued a big win to the Donald Trump administration. The ruling pauses an order from a lower court judge that required the administration to give illegal immigrants a warning before sending them to other countries with which they have no prior ties.

The program, called “third-country removal,” was shot down by a federal judge in May. U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy blocked the administration’s attempt to deport a group of immigrants to South Sudan. Shocker: Murphy is a Joe Biden appointee. Another shocker: the three justices who dissented were Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagen, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

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“When illegal aliens commit crimes in this country, they are typically ordered removed,” wrote Solicitor General D. John Sauer in his petition to the court. “But when those crimes are especially heinous, their countries of origin are often unwilling to take them back. As a result, criminal aliens are often allowed to stay in the United States for years on end, victimizing law-abiding Americans in the meantime. The Executive Branch has taken steps to resolve this problem by removing aliens to third countries that have agreed to accept them.”

“A single federal district court, however, has stalled these efforts nationwide,” Sauer continued. “On behalf of a nationwide class of aliens with final orders of removal, the district court issued an extraordinary preliminary injunction that restrains DHS from exercising its undisputed statutory authority to remove an alien to a country not specifically identified in his removal order (i.e., a “third country”), unless DHS first satisfies an onerous set of procedures invented by the district court to assess any potential claim under the Convention Against Torture (CAT), see 8 U.S.C. 1231 note, no matter how facially implausible.”

Fortunately, the six conservative justices saw the value in allowing third-country removals. One bonus to this story: this judgment came out on Justice Clarence Thomas’ birthday. Happy Birthday, sir!

Texas Law on Age Verification for Porn Sites

In another order, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to uphold a Texas law that mandates that pornographic websites verify that visitors to their websites are aged 18 or older.  Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority’s opinion for the high court. Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented.

In his opinion, Thomas wrote that protecting children from sexually explicit material online justifies the burden that age-verification places on adults accessing those sites.

“The First Amendment leaves undisturbed States’ traditional power to prevent minors from accessing speech that is obscene from their perspective,” he wrote. “That power includes the power to require proof of age before an individual can access such speech. It follows that no person—adult or child—has a First Amendment right to access such speech without first submitting proof of age.”

According to the Age Verification Providers Association, roughly 24 states have passed laws that mandate laws for age verification for pornographic websites, requiring users to be aged 18 and up.

The group that filed the lawsuit against the law, the Free Speech Coalition, said the law puts an unfair free speech burden on adults by requiring them to submit personal information that could be vulnerable to hacking or tracking. It agreed, though, that children under the age of 18 shouldn’t be seeing such content.
 

Court clears way for states to kick Planned Parenthood out of Medicaid

The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for states to exclude Planned Parenthood from their Medicaid programs.

In a 6-3 decision a divided along ideological lines, the court’s majority concluded that federal law doesn’t allow health care providers or patients to sue if a state violates a provision of federal law guaranteeing that Medicaid patients can visit their preferred provider.

The decision rejected a challenge to South Carolina’s 2018 expulsion of Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program. It will likely allow other conservative states to similarly expel reproductive and sexual health clinics — shrinking the already narrow network of providers available in the health insurance program for low-income Americans.

“Seven years ago, we took a stand to protect the sanctity of life and defend South Carolina’s authority and values — and today, we are finally victorious,” South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, said in a statement.

“Defunding” Planned Parenthood is a goal of many conservatives, who object to its abortion services. Federal law has long banned federal money from being used for abortions. But Planned Parenthood clinics provide many other health care services that are typically eligible for payment under Medicaid.

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Thursday’s ruling will make it easier for states to deprive Planned Parenthood — and other clinics that provide abortions — from receiving Medicaid payments for any of their non-abortion-related care

“Today’s decision is a grave injustice that strikes at the very bedrock of American freedom and promises to send South Carolina deeper into a health care crisis,” Paige Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, said in a statement.

The group said the decision doesn’t immediately affect Medicaid beneficiaries in the state that use its services, though they couldn’t predict when changes would kick in. The federal program has covered care for 3.5 percent of PPSA’s South Carolina patients so far this year, spokesperson Molly Rivera said, a figure much lower than the national average because the state declined to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that while the Medicaid statute guarantees beneficiaries the ability to see any qualified provider that is willing to participate in Medicaid, federal law doesn’t grant a legal right to sue if a state denies access to certain providers.

 

Parents Can Opt-Out Children Over LGBT Books

The Supreme Court also ruled 6–3 on Friday that Maryland parents who have religious objections can pull their children from public school lessons using “LGBTQ+ inclusive” storybooks.

Authored by Alito for the majority, the order reversed lower-court rulings in favor of the Montgomery County school system in suburban Washington.

“The parents are likely to succeed on their claim that the Board’s policies unconstitutionally burden their religious exercise,” Alito wrote, while adding that the books conveyed a “normative message” that sought to separate biological sex from gender. He noted that such viewpoints are contrary to the plaintiffs’ religious beliefs.

“In the absence of an injunction, the parents will continue to be put to a choice: either risk their child’s exposure to burdensome instruction, or pay substantial sums for alternative educational services,” Alito wrote. “As we have explained, that choice unconstitutionally burdens the parents’ religious exercise.”

Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan dissented. In her opinion, Sotomayor argued that the majority was trying to allow parents to separate their children from experiences that are “critical to our Nation’s civic vitality” and would sow “chaos” in public schools across the United States.

She added that “an education and an opportunity to practice living in our multicultural society ... will become a mere memory if children must be insulated from exposure to ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents’ religious beliefs.”'
 

Fee to Subsidize Phone Services

In a 6–3 order, the justices reversed an appeals court ruling that struck down the Universal Service Fund, which has allowed a charge to be added to Americans’ phone bills for decades.

The fee provides funding to phone and internet services in libraries, rural areas, and schools. The Federal Communications Commission collects the money from telecommunications providers, which pass the cost on to their customers, in order to subsidize those services.

But a majority of justices had agreed that ending the fund could be devastating for millions of people.

Writing for the majority, Kagan argued “that no impermissible transfer of authority has occurred” under the rule, adding that ”Congress sufficiently guided and constrained the discretion that it lodged with the FCC to implement the universal-service contribution scheme.”

Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, and Thomas dissented.

 

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