On September 2, 2026, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman of the District of Maryland issued a preliminary injunction blocking Trump's August 6 executive order narrowing birthright citizenship. It is the first judicial ruling on that order.
The reasoning is short, and it turns entirely on precedent. Earlier in 2026 the Supreme Court struck down Trump's first birthright citizenship order in Trump v. Barbara, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment's phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” covers everyone the United States has the power to govern and require to obey its law. Boardman wrote that 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.”
The August order was narrower than the first. It withheld citizenship from four groups: children of “alien enemies,” defined by a parent's designation under terrorism authorities; children of foreign government employees or employees of organizations with international-organization immunity; children whose parents engaged in “birth tourism” transactions; and children born in a U.S. territory where Congress has not conferred citizenship by statute, which in practice means American Samoa.
Ilya Somin, the libertarian law professor who has written critically about the order at the Volokh Conspiracy, noted that everyone in the first three categories is plainly subject to U.S. law, with the exception of children of diplomats holding diplomatic immunity, who were already excluded from birthright citizenship before any executive order.
One detail from the opinion is worth recording because the administration disputed it. Boardman observed that “nowhere in the order does it indicate it does not apply to children already born.” Government lawyers told the court the order would apply only prospectively. The injunction covers a class certified in the earlier litigation, meaning children born on U.S. soil after February 19, 2025 to parents unlawfully present or here on temporary visas. That reaches nearly everyone the new order could affect except those born to legal residents of American Samoa.
The ruling is partial in one respect: CNN reported that Boardman is allowing agencies to keep developing implementation guidance even though they cannot enforce the policy. That guidance is the subject of separate reporting on draft State Department passport rules. The administration is expected to appeal (see Trump Signs an Executive Order to End Birthright Citizenship on Day One, and the Supreme Court Strikes It Down 6-3 and Draft State Department Guidance Would Make Parents Prove Their Own Citizenship to Get a Passport for a Child Born in the United States).