Judge temporarily halts Trump’s latest birthright citizenship order

It has been just under a month since President Donald Trump issued a new executive order seeking to narrow the availability of birthright citizenship, the current guarantee of citizenship to almost everyone born in the United States. On Wednesday, a federal judge in Maryland temporarily blocked the Trump administration from enforcing that order against an expansive group of children whose parents are in the United States temporarily or without proper documentation. U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman wrote that Trump’s new order “is almost certainly unconstitutional” as it applies to that group “for the simple reason that the Supreme Court” has “already decided that” these children “are citizens at birth.”

Boardman’s ruling was the latest chapter in the battle over birthright citizenship, which began when – shortly after his inauguration for a second term – Trump issued an executive order that would have prohibited children whose parents were either undocumented immigrants or only in the United States temporarily from gaining automatic U.S. citizenship. On June 30, 2026, in Trump v. Barbara, the court struck down that order. The majority, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, stressed that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which grants citizenship to anyone “born … in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” has a “broad reach.” The exceptions to that general rule, Roberts added, are “narrow,” applying only to “the children of foreign ministers and members of” some “19th-century Indian tribes.”

On Aug. 6, Trump issued a new order that would deny automatic citizenship not only to the children of ambassadors – that is, “foreign ministers” – but also to the children of a variety of other foreign citizens in the U.S., such as other employees at a foreign embassy and employees of international organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank. The order also carved out exemptions from the birthright citizenship rule for any child whose parent was designated as an “alien enemy” under several federal laws and the children of parents who “engage[d] in a commercial transaction to ensure that the person’s mother is present in the United States, or a territory of the United States, to give birth.”

The plaintiffs in CASA v. Trump are two nonprofits that provide services to immigrants, as well as several individual members of the groups who (since the litigation began in 2025) have given birth to children in the United States. The case began as a challenge to Trump’s first executive order, but the plaintiffs went back to court last month, asking Boardman to bar the Trump administration from enforcing the new executive order against the group. They argued, among other things, that the new executive order “imposes significant additional harm because it provides so little clarity about how or to whom it applies, causing confusion and fear.” For example, they noted, there is the possibility that a child’s parents could “rightly or wrongly” be labeled an “alien enemy,” and the child could therefore be denied citizenship, “even though they do not fall within a recognized exception to birthright citizenship.” Or, they suggest, a child could be denied citizenship because their mother bought a plane ticket to come to the United States, where she then gave birth – which the Trump administration could classify as the kind of “commercial transaction” that falls within the second executive order’s sweep.

Boardman agreed that the plaintiffs had shown that they were likely to prevail (the standard for temporary relief) on their claim that the second executive order violates the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause. As confirmation that the plaintiffs’ concerns were valid, she pointed to “examples of the government hastily and without credible evidence attempting to remove people from the United States because of purported affiliations with groups deemed alien enemies.” And “[e]ven a cursory review of the 2026 Executive Order’s carveouts to birthright citizenship reveals they bear little to no resemblance to the ‘narrow exceptions’ to the rule of citizenship by birth recognized by the Supreme Court in Barbara.”