A federal judge appointed by Joe Biden has halted President Trump's revised executive order on birthright citizenship, calling it "almost certainly unconstitutional", the second time this administration's effort to redefine who qualifies as a citizen at birth has been stopped by the courts.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman, sitting in the District of Maryland, issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of Trump's August 2026 executive order titled "Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship." The order had sought to exclude from birthright citizenship the U.S.-born children of foreign terrorists, employees of foreign governments, and other narrowly defined classes of foreign nationals. Boardman, whom Biden placed on the bench in 2021, wrote in her opinion that the Supreme Court had already settled the question.
The ruling lands barely two months after the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Trump v. Barbara, which held that children born on U.S. soil to parents who are in the country illegally or on temporary visas are "citizens at birth" under the Fourteenth Amendment. Trump's August executive order was crafted as a narrower follow-up, targeting birth tourism and the children of declared foreign enemies rather than the broader categories the Supreme Court had already struck down. Boardman found even this scaled-back version ran afoul of the high court's ruling.
In a 35-page opinion in CASA v. Trump, Case No. DLB-25-201, Boardman did not hold back:
"The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are 'citizens at birth.' Barbara is the law of the land. The President must follow it. The plaintiffs have established a strong likelihood of success on the merits of their claim that the 2026 Executive Order violates the class members' Fourteenth Amendment right to citizenship."
She added that the court "must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President's most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them." That phrase, "once again", confirms Boardman had previously blocked an earlier Trump birthright citizenship directive before the Supreme Court weighed in with its June ruling.
The judge's reasoning rested on a straightforward claim: because the Supreme Court already decided that children in the certified class hold citizenship at birth, any executive order that tries to deny that status to the same class of people contradicts binding precedent. Boardman wrote that the order "conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment, contradicts 125-year-old binding Supreme Court precedent and runs counter to our nation's 250-year history of citizenship by birth."
She went further still, noting that no court in the country has ever endorsed the president's interpretation of the citizenship clause. "This court will not be the first," she wrote.
The Trump administration did not accept the decision quietly. White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis pushed back directly, framing the injunction as judicial overreach by a Biden appointee with a predictable outcome.
"This is just another ruling from an activist judge appointed by Biden attempting to thwart President Trump's commonsense agenda."
Bis also maintained that the revised executive order was drafted to comply with the Supreme Court's analysis. "The birthright citizenship executive order is consistent with the holdings and analysis set forth by the Supreme Court," she told Fox News. That assertion sets up a direct clash: the White House says the order respects the Barbara ruling, while the judge who reviewed it says it plainly violates it.
The administration's frustration fits a broader pattern. Biden-era judicial appointments have repeatedly served as obstacles to Trump's executive agenda, a dynamic that has played out across multiple policy areas this year.
What makes this injunction notable is that Trump's August order was already a retreat from his original position. His first executive order, signed on January 20, 2025, his first day back in office, attempted a sweeping redefinition of birthright citizenship that would have excluded the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants and temporary foreign visitors alike. That order drew immediate legal challenges from 22 Democratic state attorneys general and was temporarily blocked by a Reagan-appointed judge in Seattle before the Supreme Court took up the matter.
The June 2026 ruling in Trump v. Barbara shut the door on that approach with a 5-4 vote. The majority held that the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to all persons "born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means exactly what it says. After that ruling, Speaker Johnson suggested Congress would need to address the issue legislatively.
Trump's second attempt tried to thread a constitutional needle. Rather than targeting the children of illegal immigrants broadly, the August 31 order focused on birth tourism and on children born to individuals classified as "alien enemies" of the United States, members of foreign terrorist organizations, and those who lobby on behalf of foreign governments. The theory was that these narrower categories fell outside the protections the Supreme Court had affirmed.
Boardman rejected that theory. She concluded that the certified class from the Barbara litigation encompasses the people targeted by the new order, and that the Supreme Court's holding therefore applies directly.
The intellectual foundation for Trump's second attempt traces back to Justice Clarence Thomas's dissenting opinion in Trump v. Barbara. Thomas, writing for the four-justice minority, argued that the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship guarantee was never intended to cover every person born on American soil. He pointed to the amendment's original understanding, contending that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" historically "excluded from citizenship children of foreign temporary visitors, who were subject to the power of their home nation."
Thomas's reading would have drawn a distinction between children born to permanent residents, who owe allegiance to the United States, and children born to people whose primary legal relationship is with a foreign government. Trump's August order appeared to operationalize a version of that distinction, targeting categories of foreign nationals whose ties to hostile foreign powers or terrorist organizations could arguably place them outside U.S. jurisdiction in the constitutional sense.
But Thomas's view commanded only four votes at the Supreme Court. And Boardman made clear she considers the majority opinion binding, not the dissent. The gap between what the administration believes the Constitution permits and what the courts have ruled it permits remains wide, and for now, the courts hold the leverage.
The legal conflict mirrors a broader tension between the executive branch and the judiciary that has defined much of Trump's second term. The administration has repeatedly pressed for faster rulings from the Supreme Court on contested executive orders, seeking to bypass lower courts that have blocked its agenda.
CASA, the plaintiff organization that brought the challenge, framed the ruling as a definitive rebuke. Shana Khader, CASA's legal director, said the White House "must recognize it will not succeed in stripping children of their right to citizenship." The organization, which filed suit in the District of Maryland, has now won preliminary relief from Boardman twice, first against the original executive order and now against its narrower successor.
The Associated Press noted this represents Trump's second failed attempt to curtail birthright citizenship through executive action. The preliminary injunction carries more legal weight than the temporary restraining order that a Seattle judge issued against the first order, and it will likely remain in effect until a higher court rules on the matter.
That means the next stop is almost certainly the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and potentially the Supreme Court again. Whether the justices who joined the 5-4 majority in Barbara would view Trump's narrower categories differently remains an open question. The administration's argument, that foreign terrorists and agents of hostile governments occupy a different constitutional position than ordinary illegal immigrants, has not yet been tested at the appellate level.
In the meantime, a separate legal challenge to the executive order is also unfolding in New Hampshire, adding another front to the litigation. Twenty-two Democratic states had already filed challenges against the original order, and the legal infrastructure opposing Trump's birthright citizenship agenda shows no sign of standing down.
The Supreme Court has at times reversed lower-court blocks on Trump executive orders, as it did in a 6-3 ruling on mail-in voting earlier this year. But on birthright citizenship, the high court has already weighed in on the merits, and it sided against the president.
The question now is whether the administration can find a formulation narrow enough to survive a judiciary that has twice said no, or whether the only path forward runs through Congress, where the political math is far harder than signing an executive order.
When the Supreme Court speaks 5-4, one vote is all that separates settled law from a live debate. But until that fifth vote moves, no executive order, however carefully drafted, can revise the Fourteenth Amendment from the Oval Office.