Fresh blow for Trump as judge blocks latest attempt to ‘strip’ birthright citizenship from newborns
A federal judge has blocked Donald Trump’s administration from enforcing his latest executive orders targeting birthright citizenship after the president lost a landmark Supreme Court case challenging his attempt to unilaterally redefine who gets to be a citizen.
Trump signed executive orders last month taking aim at children who were born to employees of foreign governments as well as the children of mothers who are accused of lying about their intentions for visiting the country while pregnant. The orders also seeks to block citizenship to children whose parents are accused of being “alien enemies,” as well as newborns in U.S. territories.
Lawsuits were swiftly filed, including a challenge on behalf of babies who would be deprived citizenship under Trump’s original 2025 order. Lawyers asked a judge to block Trump’s latest orders to ensure their clients would retain their citizenship under the new rules.
Maryland District Judge Deborah Boardman, an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden, noted that the question before her is not whether Trump’s new “carveouts” to birthright citizenship are constitutional but whether the plaintiffs suing to stop the orders are entitled to protections against it.
“The answer to that question is yes,” she wrote Wednesday. Trump’s latest efforts are “almost certainly unconstitutional” as applied to the Supreme Court’s decision, which has “already decided that the children in the class are citizens at birth,” according to Boardman.
“This Court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them,” she wrote.
The judge stressed that the language in Trump’s latest order does not indicate whether it applies retroactively.
Trump’s initial order indicated that it applied only to children who were born 30 days after it went into effect, or on February 19, 2025.
His latest order, however, “says nothing like that,” according to Boardman.
She argued that “the only fair reading of the plain language” of Trump’s executive order is that it applies to any babies born after February 19, 2025, putting thousands of babies in legal limbo.
The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause plainly states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
But in an executive order signed on his first day in office, Trump sought to unilaterally redefine that amendment to state that babies born on U.S. soil would be denied citizenship at birth if their mother was “unlawfully present” or had “lawful but temporary” status, and if the father “was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”
A divided ruling from the nation’s high court in June determined that children born in the U.S. to parents “unlawfully or temporarily present” are indeed “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. and thus citizens at birth.
This is a developing story
