U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s latest effort to narrow birthright citizenship on Wednesday, halting enforcement of an Executive Order that would have denied citizenship to certain children born in the United States. The order targeted children of alien enemies, foreign government employees and people accused of birth tourism.
The ruling landed after President Trump signed the narrower order last month, following the Supreme Court’s decision in June to strike down his initial attempt. Boardman said the earlier ruling was "the law of the land," and concluded that the 2026 Executive Order was almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the certified class because the Supreme Court already decided those children are citizens at birth.
That makes this block more than a routine pause. It stops a policy designed to carve out exceptions from automatic citizenship for children whose parents fall into categories the administration says should not count. The order described birth tourism as a commercial transaction to travel to the United States before giving birth, and it also sought to deny citizenship to children whose parents are deemed alien enemies because they belong to terrorist organizations. The Trump administration has applied that designation to drug cartels.
The Justice Department argued that the Supreme Court’s summer ruling still left room for rules narrowing birthright citizenship, saying the court found the children of temporary or undocumented immigrants are not disqualified from citizenship at birth. Boardman saw it differently. In her view, the high court had already settled the key question, and plaintiffs’ lawyers said the President has no power to unilaterally rewrite the Constitution and warned that the risk of false allegations against parents was credible.
The plaintiffs included several immigrants and CASA, and their challenge now sits at the center of a familiar fight over the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction. Trump has been trying to eliminate or narrow birthright citizenship since returning to office last year, but Boardman’s order leaves his newest version stuck where the court says it belongs: blocked for now. What happens next is the next hearing or ruling that decides whether that pause becomes the final word.
