A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from enforcing its newest attempt to limit birthright citizenship, a ruling that shields U.S.-born children, among them the American-citizen children of Haitian immigrants, from an executive order that sought to deny them citizenship documents based on their parents’ status.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman, sitting in Maryland, issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday against the order President Trump signed August 6, according to reporting by NBC News, The Associated Press, and Reuters.
In a 35-page opinion, Boardman wrote that the order “is almost certainly unconstitutional,” and she pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this summer that had already struck down the administration’s first, broader effort. “This Court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship,” she wrote, in language quoted by NBC News.
The stakes fall heavily on immigrant communities navigating a year of shifting protections, including Haitians, roughly 350,000 of whom lost Temporary Protected Status this summer. Many Haitian parents who arrived over the past decade have since had children in the United States, children who are American citizens by birth under the 14th Amendment regardless of whether their parents’ own status has lapsed.
The order Boardman blocked would have reached exactly those families, instructing federal agencies to withhold recognition of citizenship for broad categories of U.S.-born children based on their parents’ immigration status.
The judge’s order bars the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Social Security Administration from taking any step to deny or refuse to recognize the citizenship of children covered by the case, Reuters reported. In practical terms, that means a child born in a Boston or Miami hospital to Haitian parents remains, as the law has long held, a citizen, and eligible for the passport and Social Security number that prove it.
Trump’s August order was narrower than the sweeping directive he signed on the first day of his second term in January 2025, which sought to end birthright citizenship broadly and was quickly blocked in the courts. After the Supreme Court rejected that first effort on June 30, the administration returned in August with a more targeted order.
According to CNN and CBS News, the new order instructed agencies not to recognize the citizenship of a U.S.-born child if either parent was deemed an “alien enemy,” was a foreign government employee, or had engaged in what the administration called “birth tourism”, traveling to the United States to give birth as a commercial arrangement. The State Department had also proposed requiring parents to provide proof of their own citizenship or immigration status when applying for passports for their children, a step that would have placed a new documentary burden on immigrant families.
Boardman did not dwell on parsing those exceptions. Instead, she treated the Supreme Court’s summer decision as controlling. The latest order is unconstitutional as applied to the children in the case, she wrote, “for the simple reason that the Supreme Court in Barbara already decided that the children in the class are citizens at birth,” according to CBS News. The 14th Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens”, the constitutional guarantee at the center of the dispute.
The injunction came in a class-action lawsuit brought by the immigrant rights organizations CASA and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project on behalf of children who would be denied citizenship under the policy, Reuters reported. Boardman, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, was one of several judges who blocked Trump’s original 2025 order before the Supreme Court weighed in. Notably, she had declined to act just days earlier, but only on a technicality — the initial complaint had cited the 2025 order rather than the new August one; once the complaint was updated, she moved to block it.
Shana Khader, legal director at CASA, said the administration “will not succeed in stripping children of their right to citizenship,” in a statement quoted by the Associated Press. The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to multiple outlets. Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking on Fox News, said the ruling was “not something that is a surprise” and signaled the administration would keep fighting, adding that “if we have to go back to the Supreme Court, we will.”
The injunction is preliminary, meaning it holds while the underlying lawsuit proceeds, and the administration has made clear it intends to keep litigating, potentially back to the Supreme Court. For now, the ruling preserves the status quo the Constitution has long guaranteed: that a child born on U.S. soil is a citizen from birth. For Haitian families weighing an uncertain future amid the end of TPS and expanding enforcement, the decision offers a measure of stability on one front — the citizenship of their American-born children, even as so much else remains unsettled.
https://ctninfo.com/judge-blocks-tru…-s-born-children/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/federal-judge-blocks-trumps-latest-order-limiting-birthright-citizensh-rcna595794
Judge Blocks Trump’s Latest Bid to Curb Birthright Citizenship, Protecting U.S.-Born Children
