A federal judge reinforced the constitutional right to birthright citizenship Wednesday, blocking President Donald Trump’s latest executive order to limit it.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman wrote in a 35-page ruling that Trump’s August order seeking to limit which people born in the U.S. can become American citizens “is almost certainly unconstitutional.”
Boardman cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling that Trump could not go forward with a separate 2025 executive order that sought to limit citizenship at birth.
“This Court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them,” Boardman wrote.
Last week, Boardman had denied a request from the plaintiff in the case, CASA Inc., a nonprofit organization in Maryland, to block Trump’s executive order, though she noted that her denial was only due to a technicality: The original complaint cited Trump’s 2025 order, rather than the recent August order.
“This is different,” Boardman said Friday, comparing the August order to the first order. “This is unprecedented.”
Boardman also indicated that she would rule in favor of CASA Inc. after the complaint was updated, saying that she believed Trump is “trying to rewrite the carve-outs to birthright citizenship with the stroke of a pen.”
In Wednesday’s ruling, the judge reiterated that sentiment, writing: “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.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
Attorney General Todd Blanche said in an interview on Fox News Wednesday evening that the ruling “is not something that is a surprise to us.”
“We crafted the EO around, and in concurrence, and understanding what the Supreme Court said in their decision. And so we expected— we didn’t expect this judge to say we were right,” Blanche said.
The attorney general added that the administration will “continue to fight as President Trump has talked about for many years” and “if we have to go back to the Supreme Court, we will.”
Trump signed an executive order Aug. 6 to limit who could become U.S. citizens after being born in the country. The order was more narrow than the one the president signed on his first day of his second term, which sought to widely end birthright citizenship.
That 2025 order faced immediate legal action, as opponents wrote that it went against the 14th Amendment, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
After the Supreme Court blocked that order, Trump signed the August order that focused on restricting giving birthright citizenship to certain groups of people, including those who are born to parents who are considered an “alien enemy” of the United States or who work for foreign embassies.
The State Department has proposed requiring parents to provide proof of their own citizenship or immigration status when applying for passports for their children.
