The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in a case over a policy to allow only sex assigned at birth to be used on a passport application. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to continue carrying out, for now, its policy requiring that passports only list a person’s sex assigned at birth.

The nation’s highest court paused a lower court order that temporarily barred the administration from enforcing the policy, codified in an executive order Trump signed in January. 

The executive order made it the “policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female” and called on the State Department to “implement changes to require that government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards, accurately reflect the holder’s sex.” 

Under then-President Joe Biden, the State Department allowed people to “select an ‘X’ as their gender marker on their U.S. passport application.”

In the unsigned court order, the majority noted that “displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth — in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.”  

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, indicating a 6-3 decision.

Jackson, who authored the dissent, wrote that the court “fails to spill any ink considering the plaintiffs, opting instead to intervene in the Government’s favor without equitable justification, and in a manner that permits harm to be inflicted on the most vulnerable party.” 

“This Court has once again paved the way for the immediate infliction of injury without adequate (or, really, any) justification,” she wrote. “Because I cannot acquiesce to this pointless but painful perversion of our equitable discretion, I respectfully dissent.” 

In February, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the administration on behalf of seven transgender and nonbinary people over the suspension of the Biden-era policy.

A federal judge in Massachusetts in June temporarily blocked the administration from enforcing the policy. The judge had issued an earlier preliminary injunction in April that applied to six of the case’s plaintiffs. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit kept in place the district court’s order in September, prompting the administration to ask the Supreme Court to intervene.  

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a Nashville press conference on July 18, 2025, to discuss arrests of immigrants during recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps. (Photo by John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court Friday again allowed the Trump administration to strip temporary protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelans, opening them up for quick deportations as the president continues with his plans for mass deportations.  

The conservative justices granted, 6-3, President Donald Trump’s request from last month to pause a federal judge’s ruling that found Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lacked the authority to revoke Temporary Protected Status granted to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants under the Biden administration. 

All three liberal justices sided with the lower court, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writing a dissent with the conservative Supreme Court majority. She criticized the high court’s use of the emergency docket, also known as the shadow docket, which can allow the justices to avoid explaining their reasoning for decisions brought on an emergency basis. 

“We once again use our equitable power (but not our opinion-writing capacity) to allow this Administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible,” Jackson wrote. 

The conservative justices did not explain their reasoning but said the harms faced by the Trump administration remained the same as when the case was first brought to the high court in May.

Jackson said that not only were the lower courts correct in their orders to block the removal of TPS protections to limit harm, but that the Supreme Court should have denied the emergency request from the Trump administration.

“Having opted instead to join the fray, the Court plainly misjudges the irreparable harm and balance-of-the-equities factors by privileging the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our Government has promised them,” Jackson wrote. 

“Because, respectfully, I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance, I dissent,” she continued. 

The suit in the Northern District of California will continue despite Friday’s emergency ruling from the high court. 

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that Noem had the authority to revoke extended protections initially granted to Venezuelans under the Biden administration. 

Former President Joe Biden granted TPS for Venezuelans who came to the U.S. in 2021 and 2023. Those TPS protections were set to last until October 2026. 

TPS is granted when a national’s home country is deemed too dangerous to return to due to violence, political instability or extreme natural disasters. It’s renewed every 18 months and protects immigrants from deportation and allows them access to work permits.

This is the second time the Trump administration has appealed to the high court to allow it to end TPS protections for Venezuelans. In late May, the Supreme Court paved the way for the Trump administration to temporarily terminate TPS for more than 300,000 Venezuelans while the case continued in lower courts.