Federal judge blocks Trump's revised birthright citizenship order, White House disputes ruling

A federal judge in Maryland has issued a preliminary injunction against President Donald Trump's Aug. 6 executive order limiting birthright citizenship, the second time U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman has blocked a White House attempt to narrow the 14th Amendment's guarantee. The 35-page ruling came after the Supreme Court held, in a 5-4 decision in Barbara v. Trump, that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth.

The ruling

Boardman wrote that the 2026 executive order is "almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the certified class for the simple reason that the Supreme Court in Barbara already decided that the children in the class are citizens at birth." Her injunction is the first to halt the revised order since that June Supreme Court decision. The suit was brought by Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), whose legal director Shana Khader said the White House "has lost before this court, lost before the Supreme Court, and lost again today."

The order targeted children whose parents the government designates as alien enemies, including members of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and children born to foreign parents who paid a surrogate in the United States. Boardman rejected the administration's read of who qualifies as an alien enemy, pointing to two named plaintiffs: Andrea, who fled a region of Mexico where a designated cartel operates and whose child's father has a relative in that group, and Monica, a Venezuelan woman who feared her family could be wrongly tied to the gang Tren de Aragua. The ruling found that children of those "rightly or wrongfully" labeled alien enemies face a credible threat of being denied citizenship outside any recognized constitutional exception.

What to watch

The White House pushed back on the decision. Spokeswoman Lauren Bis said the order "is consistent with the holdings and analysis set forth by the Supreme Court," and the administration labeled Boardman an "activist judge appointed by Biden attempting to thwart President Trump's commonsense agenda." Abhi Kambli, a former Justice Department official, challenged the ruling's legal basis, telling Fox News Digital that a facial challenge requires plaintiffs to demonstrate the order is unlawful across every application. He argued Boardman accepted speculative scenarios about the administration misidentifying someone as an alien enemy and then applying that error to the person's child. Boardman drew on First Circuit precedent to find that a temporary loss of birthright citizenship still causes cascading harm likely to leave "permanent scars" on children and their families, the standard she applied to satisfy the irreparable harm requirement for a preliminary injunction.

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