A federal judge has blocked Trump’s second try to restrict birthright citizenship
“No presidential executive order can undo what the Supreme Court has done,” Judge Deborah L. Boardman wrote.
A federal judge in Maryland temporarily blocked much of President Donald Trump’s latest effort to withhold citizenship from babies born in the United States to noncitizen parents, ruling that the Supreme Court had already settled questions reopened by an executive order Trump signed in August.
While the decision was limited to children born after Feb. 19, 2025, including those born in the future, Judge Deborah L. Boardman wrote that the order would likely affect babies the Supreme Court had already defined as citizens. The ruling delivered a sharp rejection of the president’s renewed efforts to restrict birthright citizenship, after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in July that a previous, more sweeping, executive order from 2025 was unconstitutional.
“No presidential executive order can undo what the Supreme Court has done,” she wrote.
Boardman’s order took a dim view of the Trump administration’s reasoning, which she characterized as a thinly veiled attempt to get around the Supreme Court’s decision. She wrote that the president and others named in the lawsuit “completely misread” the majority’s opinion and embraced a “distorted interpretation” of its conclusions.
In a 35-page opinion, she described the latest order as only the most recent attempt to curtail birthright citizenship by any means that could survive legal scrutiny.
“Since his second term in office began on January 20, 2025, the president has tried, through executive order, to upend our country’s longstanding tradition of birthright citizenship and eliminate, for large swaths of Americans, the right to citizenship by birth, a right enshrined in the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” she wrote.
Boardman described a number of ways that children covered by the lawsuit could have their citizenship rescinded, including if the Trump administration moved to label their parents members of terrorist groups or “alien enemies” under arbitrary legal determinations. She cited a pattern in which the administration has accused Venezuelan nationals of being affiliated with the criminal organization Tren de Aragua, often without evidence, in deportation proceedings.
While she stressed that it was too soon to find that the order itself was unconstitutional, she wrote that it already appeared clear that it was unconstitutional as applied to the class of babies defined when immigration groups initially sued last year to block Trump’s first order.
The order this year had included other measures to create novel categories of babies that could be disqualified from citizenship, including those born to parents engaged in so-called “birth tourism,” through which mothers deliberately traveled to the United States to give birth.
It was unclear how the Trump administration planned to tag those it suspected of traveling to the United States to have their children. But Boardman noted that the executive order was broad, describing anyone who engaged in a “commercial transaction” — such as purchasing a plane ticket — as traveling to access birthright citizenship.
The Supreme Court’s decision upholding birthright citizenship “is the law of the land,” Boardman wrote. “The President must follow it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
