A federal judge has partially blocked President Donald Trump’s second attempt to narrow birthright citizenship, ruling that the administration may not deny citizenship to a class of children the Supreme Court has already found to be citizens. U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman, sitting in Greenbelt, Maryland, granted the preliminary injunction on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, in the case known as CASA v. Trump.
The block is only partial. Federal agencies may not enforce the new policy against the children covered by the case, but they may keep developing internal guidance on how it would be carried out if it ever takes effect.
The order reaches the certified class in the lawsuit — any children who would have been denied citizenship under Trump’s first executive order — and covers children born after February 19, 2025, including those born in the future. It bars the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration, among other agencies, from taking any step to interfere with, deny or refuse to recognize those children’s citizenship.
A Sharp Rebuke From the Bench
In a 35-page opinion, Boardman, an appointee of President Joe Biden, treated the August policy as an effort to sidestep a decision the justices had already handed down. “No presidential executive order can undo what the Supreme Court has done,” she wrote, adding that “Barbara is the law of the land. The President must follow it.” She found that the president and the other defendants had badly misread the majority opinion and adopted a skewed view of its conclusions, and she warned that the 2026 order, left unblocked as to the class, could strip citizenship by birth from children the court had declared citizens.
Boardman concluded that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim that the second order violates the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. The carveouts written into the August order, she said, look nothing like the narrow set of exceptions the Supreme Court recognized, which the chief justice confined to the offspring of foreign diplomats and to members of certain Indian tribes of the 1800s.
She also faulted the order’s breadth. It treats a parent who took part in a commercial transaction — buying a plane ticket, for example — as having traveled to the United States to obtain citizenship for a child, she noted. And she cited the administration’s record of accusing Venezuelan nationals of ties to the criminal organization Tren de Aragua in deportation proceedings, often without evidence, as reason to credit the plaintiffs’ fear that parents could be labeled alien enemies and their children denied citizenship as a result. The orders are vague, she added, about whom they cover and whether they operate retroactively or only going forward. It was too early, she stressed, to declare the order unconstitutional on its face — but as applied to the certified class, she said, its unconstitutionality already appeared clear.
Five Days Earlier, a Different Answer
The injunction came five days after Boardman had declined to act. On Friday, August 28, she refused to grant immediate relief against the new policy even as she voiced concern about it. “As far as I can tell, this is unprecedented,” she said of the order. She directed the plaintiffs — the immigrant services group CASA and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, along with several individual members of the two nonprofits who have given birth in the United States since the litigation began in 2025 — to challenge the August order directly in a revised complaint, and said she would set a briefing schedule once they did.
Reaction From the Administration
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said the executive order tracks what the Supreme Court decided. The White House also cast the ruling as judicial activism by a Biden appointee trying to obstruct the president’s agenda.
U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, said the government had never expected this judge to rule its way and was not caught off guard. “If we have to go back to the Supreme Court, we will,” Blanche said.
How the Dispute Got Here
Trump signed his first birthright citizenship order on January 20, 2025, the opening day of his second term. It barred agencies from issuing citizenship documents to children whose parents were unlawfully present in the country or whose presence was lawful but temporary, and it was to take effect 30 days later. It never did. On January 23, 2025, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour in Seattle, a Reagan appointee, issued a 14-day temporary restraining order in a case brought by Washington Attorney General Nick Brown and three other Democratic-led states, calling the policy blatantly unconstitutional. Boardman blocked the first order as well, with a preliminary injunction in February 2025.
On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court struck that order down 6-3 in Trump v. Barbara. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts held that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth, and that the Citizenship Clause has a broad reach with only narrow exceptions. Justice Samuel Alito dissented, and Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissent joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who also filed a short dissent of his own. The case reached the court from a New Hampshire class action before U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante.
Trump signed the replacement order in the Oval Office on August 6. It instructs agencies not to recognize the citizenship of children of noncitizen parents when either parent is an alien enemy, a foreign government employee or engaged in so-called birth tourism, and it extends to the children of foreign embassy staff and employees of international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank. It would also exclude children born in American Samoa, the one U.S. territory whose residents are not made citizens by any federal statute. In championing the order, Trump pointed to the risks he said are posed by foreign actors who exploit the country’s generosity at the expense of American citizens.
A second challenge to the August policy is pending in New Hampshire. For the children in the Maryland class, the policy stays on hold while the litigation continues.