A federal judge has partially blocked President Donald Trump’s second attempt to narrow birthright citizenship. Sitting in Greenbelt, Maryland, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman granted a preliminary injunction on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, in the case known as CASA v. Trump. Under her ruling, the administration may not deny citizenship to a class of children the Supreme Court has already found to be citizens.
The relief has limits. Federal agencies are barred from enforcing the new policy against the children the case covers, but they remain free to keep developing internal guidance on how it would be carried out if it ever takes effect.
Any children who would have been denied citizenship under Trump’s first executive order fall inside the lawsuit’s certified class. 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, spent 35 pages treating 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 v. Barbara] is the law of the land. The President must follow it.” The president and the other defendants had badly misread the majority opinion and adopted a skewed view of its conclusions, she found. The 2026 order, she warned, could strip citizenship by birth from children the court had declared citizens if it were left unblocked as to the class.
Boardman also concluded, on the merits, that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim that the second order violates the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. The chief justice had confined the narrow set of exceptions recognized by the Supreme Court to the offspring of foreign diplomats and to members of certain Indian tribes of the 1800s, and those exceptions bear no resemblance to the carveouts written into the August order, she said.
She faulted the order’s breadth as well. Buying a plane ticket counts as a commercial transaction, she noted, and a parent who took part in one is treated as having traveled to the United States to obtain citizenship for a child. The plaintiffs fear that parents could be labeled alien enemies and their children denied citizenship as a result; she found that fear credible, pointing to the administration’s record of accusing Venezuelan nationals of ties to the criminal organization Tren de Aragua in deportation proceedings, often without evidence. Vagueness, she added, runs through the orders 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 she said the order’s unconstitutionality already appeared clear as applied to the certified class.
A Different Answer Five Days Earlier
Five days before the injunction, Boardman had declined to act. On Friday, August 28, she voiced concern about the new policy but would not grant immediate relief against it that day. “As far as I can tell, this is unprecedented,” she said of the order. 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 — were directed by the judge to challenge the August order directly in a revised complaint, and she said a briefing schedule would follow once they did.
The Administration Responds
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said the executive order tracks what the Supreme Court decided. A Biden appointee had engaged in judicial activism to obstruct the president’s agenda, the White House said of the ruling.
U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking to Fox News on Wednesday night, said this judge had never been expected to rule the government’s way and that the decision did not catch it 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 January 20, 2025, the opening day of his second term. 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, and it set an effective date 30 days later that never arrived. Boardman blocked that first order as well, with a preliminary injunction in February 2025.
The Supreme Court struck that order down 6-3 on June 30, 2026, in Trump v. Barbara. Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, and only narrow exceptions limit the broad reach of the Citizenship Clause. Justice Samuel Alito dissented. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissent that Justice Neil Gorsuch joined, and Gorsuch filed a short dissent of his own as well. The case had reached the justices from a New Hampshire class action before U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante.
On August 6, in the Oval Office, Trump signed the replacement order. Its instruction to agencies is 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 the order 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.
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.
