Federal judge temporarily blocks Trump's narrower birthright-citizenship order

U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman on Wednesday temporarily stopped the Trump administration from enforcing its latest order limiting automatic citizenship at birth. She found that the people challenging the measure were likely to succeed in showing that it violated their rights under the 14th Amendment. That constitutional provision grants citizenship to people born or naturalized in the United States who are subject to its jurisdiction.

President Donald Trump's narrower order covered children of people classified as alien enemies, children of foreign government employees, and births linked to what the administration described as birth tourism. The order defined the last category around a commercial transaction used to travel to the United States before giving birth. The preliminary block prevents enforcement while the legal challenge proceeds; it does not represent a final judgment resolving every category in the order.

Boardman relied on an earlier Supreme Court decision concerning the administration's first effort to end or narrow birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court rejected that initial attempt in June. Calling the earlier ruling the law of the land, Boardman said the justices had already determined that the children in the certified class are citizens at birth and that the 2026 order was almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to them.

Government lawyers argued that the Supreme Court's earlier ruling still left room for recognized exceptions. They pointed to children of diplomats and alien enemies and said the justices had established only that children of temporary or undocumented immigrants were not disqualified from citizenship at birth. In the government's reading, that holding did not mean every child born to those parents qualified without any possible exception.

The plaintiffs, including several immigrants and the advocacy organization CASA, argued that the historically accepted exceptions are narrow and that the president cannot expand them through an executive order. Their lawyers also warned that class members could lose recognition of citizenship because of false allegations about their parents. Some plaintiffs feared that buying a plane ticket to the United States could be treated as the commercial transaction targeted by the order's birth-tourism provision. Their filing described that risk as credible.