In a fresh legal blow to the second Trump administration’s sweeping immigration restriction agenda, a federal judge has temporarily halted President Donald Trump’s latest bid to curtail birthright citizenship in the United States, marking the second time this year courts have blocked the president’s efforts after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his initial proposal.
Following the Supreme Court’s June ruling that rejected his first broad executive order seeking to end automatic birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants, Trump signed a scaled-back version in August that targeted two specific groups: people participating in so-called “birth tourism” and individuals labeled “alien enemies” by his administration. Birth tourism refers to the practice of foreign pregnant people traveling to the U.S. specifically to give birth, so their children receive automatic citizenship under longstanding U.S. law. While the practice is already illegal under existing federal rules, the August order sought to tighten enforcement and expand penalties for facilitators. The order also designated “alien enemies” to include members of designated terrorist organizations and transnational drug cartels, and extended citizenship denials to children of foreign government officials working in the U.S.
On Wednesday, Judge Deborah Boardman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland issued a preliminary injunction that immediately blocks enforcement of the order, ruling that the proposal is still almost certainly a violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of automatic birthright citizenship for nearly all people born on U.S. soil. “The 2026 Executive Order is almost certainly unconstitutional,” Boardman wrote in her decision, referencing the high court’s rejection of Trump’s earlier policy. “This Court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them.”
The injunction will remain in place until a full legal resolution of the lawsuit brought by a coalition of leading immigrant advocacy organizations, including CASA and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project. The same coalition successfully challenged Trump’s first executive order earlier this year. Legal analysts widely expect the Trump administration to appeal Boardman’s ruling, a step the White House has all but confirmed through its public pushback.
Department of Justice lawyers defending the order argued that the Supreme Court’s June ruling upholding the core right to birthright citizenship did not rule out narrow, targeted exceptions to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee. They noted that historical exceptions already exist for children of foreign diplomats and certain enemy combatants, claiming the new order fell within these allowed boundaries.
But the White House struck a sharper tone in its response to the ruling Thursday, per CBS News, a BBC media partner. “This is just another ruling from an activist judge appointed by Biden attempting to thwart President Trump’s commonsense agenda,” a White House spokesperson said, adding that “the birthright citizenship executive order is consistent with the holdings and analysis set forth by the Supreme Court.”
Trump’s repeated attempts to roll back birthright citizenship are a core plank of the administration’s broader, aggressive strategy to cut overall immigration to the U.S. Since returning to office, the administration has ended Temporary Protected Status for multiple countries, ramped up interior deportations, and set new records for immigration arrests along the southern border. In August alone, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection recorded nearly 51,000 arrests, the highest monthly total in modern U.S. history.