A federal judge in Maryland has issued a preliminary injunction blocking President Donald Trump’s latest executive order narrowing birthright citizenship, ruling the move is likely unconstitutional under a June Supreme Court decision.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman, who was appointed to the bench by former President Joe Biden in 2021, issued the ruling Thursday in the case CASA v. Trump, No. DLB-25-201, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
The order Boardman blocked, signed by Trump in August, sought to exclude certain groups from automatic birthright citizenship, including the U.S.-born children of foreign terrorists, members of foreign terrorist organizations, and people lobbying on behalf of foreign governments.
Boardman’s ruling leans heavily on the Supreme Court’s June decision in Trump v. Barbara, a 5-4 ruling that found denying birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants and temporary foreign visitors violates the Fourteenth Amendment.
“The 2026 Executive Order is almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the certified class for the simple reason that the Supreme Court in Barbara already decided that the children in the class are citizens 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.
“The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are ‘citizens at birth.’ Barbara is the law of the land. The President must follow it. The plaintiffs have established a strong likelihood of success on the merits of their claim that the 2026 Executive Order violates the class members’ Fourteenth Amendment right to citizenship.”
The Barbara ruling itself was not unanimous. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the principal dissent for the four-justice minority, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that a person be “not subject to any foreign power” to receive automatic citizenship at birth was meant to exclude children of foreign temporary visitors, who remain subject to the authority of their home countries.
Trump’s August order was his administration’s attempt to work within the boundaries the Supreme Court set in Barbara, narrowing the categories of people affected rather than reviving the broader restrictions the Court had already struck down. Boardman’s injunction now halts that narrower version as well while the underlying legal challenge proceeds.
