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A US federal judge on Wednesday blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a renewed executive order seeking to restrict birthright citizenship, dealing another setback to President Donald Trump’s effort to narrow the constitutional guarantee.
The judge observed that the policy was likely unconstitutional and violated the 14th Amendment. U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman granted a preliminary injunction in a case brought by two immigration advocacy groups that had also challenged the Trump administration’s initial attempt last year to limit who is eligible for automatic citizenship at birth, The Hill reported. Boardman wrote in a 35-page opinion that the new directive was “almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the certified class,” pointing to the Supreme Court decision in June that struck down Trump’s Day 1 executive order.
“This Court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them,” Boardman, a Biden appointee, wrote. Her order prohibits the administration from enforcing the new restriction against any child born after February 19, 2025, to one or both parents who were not lawfully in the country at the time. Boardman said the Supreme Court had already established that children born in the United States are citizens at birth, including when their parents are unlawfully or temporarily in the country.
“The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are ‘citizens at birth,'” Boardman wrote in her 35-page opinion. The ruling marks the latest setback to Trump’s efforts to narrow the constitutional guarantee of citizenship for people born in the United States. Judge Deborah Boardman ruling has barred the administration from enforcing the more limited policy issued after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s broader attempt to end birthright citizenship, while allowing federal agencies to continue preparing guidance on how the order would be implemented.
It came roughly two months after the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s initial effort to end birthright citizenship. Boardman had initially declined to block the directive signed by Trump on Aug. 6 but allowed immigrant rights groups to amend their lawsuit before considering whether to issue a preliminary injunction against what she described as an “unprecedented” order. “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,” Boardman said in her Wednesday opinion.
Her order bars the federal government from “taking any other action to interfere with, deny, or fail to recognize the citizenship” of children born to unlawful or temporarily present foreign nationals. Boardman further said the executive order was “almost certainly unconstitutional” in light of a Supreme Court ruling issued on June 30. Trump has argued that birthright citizenship has been “made into a joke.” CNN reported Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News on Wednesday that the executive order had been drafted with the Supreme Court’s ruling in mind.
“We didn’t expect this judge to say we were right and so this is not something that is a surprise to us,” Blanche said. He later added, “If we have to go back to the Supreme Court, we will.” The latest executive action sought to tighten existing laws and narrow the recognized exceptions to birthright citizenship, a principle enshrined in the 14th Amendment that generally grants US citizenship to people born on American soil regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
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