Maryland judge blocks Trump’s second order on birthright citizenship

U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman in Greenbelt, Maryland, on 2 September blocked President Donald Trump's latest executive order on birthright citizenship. The 35-page opinion grants a preliminary injunction covering children born after 19 February 2025, including those not yet born. Boardman wrote that the Supreme Court has already decided the status of the certified class. "The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are 'citizens at birth,'" she said. "No presidential executive order can undo what the Supreme Court has done."

The August order was narrower than the directive Trump signed on his first day back in office in January 2025. That first order tried to deny citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who were in the country illegally or on short visas. The Supreme Court struck the core of that order in June, in a case Boardman refers to as Barbara. The new text aims at two other groups: children whose parents came in a "commercial transaction" to obtain citizenship, the practice the White House calls birth tourism, and children of people the government labels "alien enemies," including those it links to foreign missions or to groups such as Tren de Aragua.

Justice Department lawyers told the court the new order only filled gaps the justices left open. Boardman called that a "distorted interpretation." She said that whatever implementing guidance agencies write, the order itself tells the State Department, Homeland Security, and the Social Security Administration to withhold citizenship papers from broad categories of children. She was not yet prepared to hold the entire order unconstitutional on its face. She was prepared to hold that it is almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the class already certified, because Barbara already called those children citizens at birth.

The injunction's date line matters. Because of the history of the case, it does not reach children born before 19 February 2025. Department lawyers said the new order is not retroactive. The judge noted they had not filed a sworn statement to that effect. For hospitals, passport offices, and Social Security counters, the practical rule from Wednesday is this: do not deny papers to a child in the class born after that February date on the strength of the August order.

Boardman, a Biden appointee, described a pattern. Since 20 January 2025, she wrote, the president has tried by executive order to "upend our country's longstanding tradition of birthright citizenship" and to remove it "for large swaths of Americans." Shana Khader, legal director at We Are CASA, said the White House would not succeed in "stripping children of their right to citizenship, evading binding court decisions or placing the president's anti-immigrant agenda above the Constitution."

The administration can appeal. It can also write a third order. Each new text has been thinner than the last and has still run into the same clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the same certified class. The information that is easy to miss in the political argument is the date on the injunction. Children born after 19 February 2025 keep their papers while the case proceeds. Children born before that date are outside this order and still live under whatever practice agencies were using before August. That split is now the working law in Maryland's courtroom, and agencies nationwide have been told to follow it for the class.