President Donald Trump’s second attempt to narrow birthright citizenship has been partially blocked in federal court. U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman, sitting in Greenbelt, Maryland, granted a preliminary injunction on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, in the case known as CASA v. Trump. Her ruling holds that a class of children already found by the Supreme Court to be citizens cannot have that citizenship denied by the administration.
The block goes only so far. Federal agencies are barred from enforcing the new policy against the children the case covers, but nothing stops them from continuing to develop internal guidance on how it would be carried out if it ever takes effect.
The lawsuit’s certified class falls within the order’s reach: any children who would have been denied citizenship under Trump’s first executive order. Coverage extends to children born after February 19, 2025, including those born in the future. Under the injunction, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration, among other agencies, may not take any step to interfere with, deny or refuse to recognize those children’s citizenship.
A Sharp Rebuke From the Bench
Boardman, an appointee of President Joe Biden, used 35 pages to treat the August policy as an effort to sidestep a decision the justices had already handed down. “No presidential executive order can undo what the Supreme Court has done,” she wrote, adding that “[Trump vs] Barbara is the law of the land. The President must follow it.” The president and the other defendants, she found, had badly misread the majority opinion and adopted a skewed view of its conclusions. Left unblocked as to the class, she warned, the 2026 order could strip citizenship by birth from children the court had declared citizens.
On the merits, the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim that the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is violated by the second order, Boardman concluded. The narrow set of exceptions the Supreme Court recognized — which the chief justice confined to the offspring of foreign diplomats and to members of certain Indian tribes of the 1800s — bears no resemblance to the carveouts written into the August order, she said.
The order’s breadth drew her criticism as well. A parent who took part in a commercial transaction — buying a plane ticket, for example — is treated as having traveled to the United States to obtain citizenship for a child, she noted. Plaintiffs fear that parents could be labeled alien enemies and their children denied citizenship as a result, and she found that fear credible, citing the administration’s record of accusing Venezuelan nationals of ties to the criminal organization Tren de Aragua in deportation proceedings, often without evidence. Vagueness runs through the orders, she added, on the questions of whom they cover and whether they operate retroactively or only going forward. A facial declaration of unconstitutionality would be premature, she stressed — yet as applied to the certified class, she said, its unconstitutionality already appeared clear.
Five Days Earlier, a Different Answer
Boardman had declined to act five days before the injunction. Immediate relief against the new policy was something she would not grant on Friday, August 28, though she voiced concern about it that day. “As far as I can tell, this is unprecedented,” she said of the order. She directed the plaintiffs — the immigrant services group CASA and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, along with several individual members of the two nonprofits who have given birth in the United States since the litigation began in 2025 — to challenge the August order directly in a revised complaint, and said a briefing schedule would follow once they did.
Reaction From the Administration
The executive order tracks what the Supreme Court decided, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said. A Biden appointee engaged in judicial activism to obstruct the president’s agenda was how the White House characterized the ruling.
Sitting for an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the government had never expected this judge to rule its way and was not caught off guard. “If we have to go back to the Supreme Court, we will,” Blanche said.
How the Dispute Got Here
Trump signed his first birthright citizenship order on the opening day of his second term, January 20, 2025. Agencies were barred by it from issuing citizenship documents to children whose parents were unlawfully present in the country or whose presence was lawful but temporary, with an effective date set 30 days later that never arrived. U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee in Seattle, issued a 14-day temporary restraining order on January 23, 2025, calling the policy blatantly unconstitutional in a case brought by three other Democratic-led states and Washington Attorney General Nick Brown. A preliminary injunction from Boardman in February 2025 blocked the first order as well.
The Supreme Court struck that order down 6-3 on June 30, 2026, in Trump v. Barbara. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, held that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth, and that only narrow exceptions limit the broad reach of the Citizenship Clause. A dissent came from Justice Samuel Alito. Justice Neil Gorsuch joined a dissent written by Justice Clarence Thomas and also filed a short dissent of his own. A New Hampshire class action before U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante had carried the case up to the court.
Trump signed the replacement order in the Oval Office on August 6. It instructs agencies not to recognize the citizenship of children of noncitizen parents when either parent is an alien enemy, a foreign government employee or engaged in so-called birth tourism, and it extends to the children of foreign embassy staff and employees of international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank. Children born in American Samoa — the one U.S. territory whose residents are not made citizens by any federal statute — would be excluded as well. In championing the order, Trump pointed to the risks he said are posed by foreign actors who exploit the country’s generosity at the expense of American citizens.
A second challenge to the August policy remains pending in New Hampshire. For the children in the Maryland class, the policy stays on hold while the litigation continues.
