A federal court has for the second time stopped President Donald Trump's attempt to narrow birthright citizenship, this time targeting a version of the policy his administration had redrawn specifically to survive judicial scrutiny.
Maryland US District Judge Deborah L. Boardman issued a preliminary injunction blocking an executive order Trump signed on August 6, which sought to deny automatic citizenship to specific categories of children born in the United States to noncitizen parents. The order followed a sweeping 2025 attempt to end birthright citizenship altogether, one the Supreme Court struck down 6-3 on June 30, 2026, in Trump v. Barbara. Boardman had blocked the original Trump order before the dispute eventually ended up in the Supreme Court.
Rather than abandon the effort, the administration tried a narrower route, carving out exceptions for children of "alien enemies," including designated terrorist or cartel members, children of foreign government and international organisation employees, and children of parents deemed to have engaged in "birth tourism" through commercial travel arrangements.
Boardman's order halts these exclusions for a certified class of children born after February 19, 2025, (Trump’s initial order took effect from this date) to parents who are undocumented or hold temporary visas.
The judge has shaped this litigation from the outset, having granted the original injunction against Trump's 2025 order. Her latest ruling came after a brief procedural detour. Last week she declined, on technical grounds, a request from plaintiff CASA Inc, a Maryland-based immigrant advocacy group, to block the August order, noting that the original complaint had cited the earlier order rather than the new one. She was nonetheless sceptical of the administration's approach, describing the attempt to rework the exceptions as unprecedented. Once CASA amended its filing, she moved to block the order outright.
Central to her reasoning was that the August order was almost certainly unconstitutional under Barbara, which she called binding on the executive. She wrote that the administration had misread the Supreme Court's conclusions and built the order on a distorted interpretation of them, characterising it as an attempt to reopen questions the court had already settled. No presidential order, she held, can undo what the Supreme Court has done. Since Barbara established that children born to temporary or undocumented immigrants acquire citizenship at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment, she concluded the court was bound to stop this latest attempt to erode that guarantee.
The dispute turns on the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which extends citizenship to all persons born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction. The administration argued that Barbara was narrower than the plaintiffs claimed, protecting children of undocumented immigrants from a blanket ban without guaranteeing citizenship to every child born to a noncitizen. It contended that the Constitution permits historical exceptions, chiefly for children of diplomats and enemy combatants, and sought to stretch the "alien enemy" category to cover relatives of terrorist and cartel suspects, while arguing that birth tourism amounted to a commercial transaction rather than a basis for jurisdiction.
Boardman and the plaintiffs took a narrower historical view, noting that such exceptions have traditionally applied only to children of diplomats with immunity and, in the nineteenth century, to certain Indigenous tribes. She held that being subject to US jurisdiction simply meant being governed by US law, a description that applies to the children of alleged alien enemies, birth tourists and foreign government employees alike, leaving no constitutional basis for excluding them.
The ruling deals a blow to one of Trump's central campaign commitments and halts, for now, his attempt to reshape citizenship policy through executive action rather than legislation.
The administration has signalled it will press on. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the ruling came as no surprise, insisting the order had been crafted with the Supreme Court's reasoning in mind, and confirmed plans to return to the top court. Separately, the State Department is weighing a proposal requiring parents to prove their own citizenship or immigration status when seeking passports for their children.
For immigrant families, the injunction offers temporary protection against citizenship claims resting on contested allegations against parents. Plaintiffs' lawyers pointed to cases in which the administration's expansive reading of "alien enemy" had already been used to allege cartel ties against Venezuelan nationals in deportation proceedings, without much supporting evidence. The birth tourism clause, meanwhile, had unsettled families who feared that the simple act of buying a plane ticket could be read as a commercial transaction undermining their children's citizenship claims.
For now, the constitutional guarantee stands.
