Federal judge blocks Trump's new bid to abolish birthright citizenship citing Supreme Court precedent

A U.S. federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction that blocks the Trump administration from enforcing a new executive order aimed at limiting birthright citizenship, marking the second judicial defeat of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the constitutional right.

The ruling was handed down by U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman in Maryland after a coalition of civil‑rights groups appealed the August 6 order, which the president framed as a measure against “birth tourism.” Boardman’s 35‑page decision cites Supreme Court precedent that children born in the United States are citizens at birth and concludes that the administration’s latest directive is “almost certainly unconstitutional.” The injunction follows an earlier Supreme Court decision that rejected Trump’s first attempt to strip citizenship from children born to parents who are in the country without legal residence or on temporary visas. That prior order had been blocked by lower courts on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, which guarantees citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil.

In the current case, the administration argued that the request to halt the order was premature and that federal agencies would eventually issue guidance to implement it, but the judge rejected that argument, emphasizing that the order explicitly commands agencies to deny citizenship documents to broad categories of children, directly contravening established constitutional law. Legal advocates for immigrant rights hailed the decision as a reaffirmation of constitutional protections. Shana Khader, legal director of Maryland‑based group We Are CASA, noted that the administration’s repeated attempts to erode birthright citizenship have been consistently rebuffed by the courts, from district judges to the nation’s highest court. The blocked order was part of a broader Trump immigration agenda that seeks to expel millions of undocumented migrants and remove deportation safeguards for nationals of more than a dozen countries, underscoring the administration’s continued focus on tightening immigration policy despite judicial setbacks.

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