A Biden-appointed judge just blocked President Donald Trump’s revised birthright citizenship executive order — setting up another major legal showdown over the 14th Amendment and who gets to be an American citizen at birth.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman issued a 35-page preliminary injunction halting Trump’s Aug. 6 executive order. That order came one month after the Supreme Court ruled on birthright citizenship in Barbara v. Trump — and Trump tried to thread the needle with narrower restrictions.
The White House isn’t backing down.
“THE BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP EXECUTIVE ORDER IS CONSISTENT WITH THE HOLDINGS AND ANALYSIS SET FORTH BY THE SUPREME COURT.”
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis rejected Boardman’s ruling as the work of an “activist judge appointed by Biden attempting to thwart President Trump’s commonsense agenda.”
Trump’s revised order targeted children whose parents are deemed alien enemies — including members of designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations — and children whose foreign parents paid a U.S. surrogate to give birth. The order also imposed restrictions on children born to parents engaged in hostile acts against the United States.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in June that children born in the U.S. to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are “citizens at birth” under the 14th Amendment. But the Court acknowledged exceptions — children of foreign diplomats or children born during an enemy’s hostile occupation of U.S. soil.
Trump’s team argued the new order fits within those recognized exceptions. Boardman disagreed.
“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,” Boardman wrote. “This Court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them.”
Boardman pointed to two plaintiffs in the case — a woman named Andrea, who fled cartel-controlled Mexico and whose child’s father has a relative in the designated group, and Monica, a Venezuelan woman who fears her family could be wrongly linked to the violent gang Tren de Aragua.
The judge bought into the plaintiffs’ argument that the Trump administration had a “broad view of who qualifies as an enemy” — allegedly sometimes relying on “false or speculative allegations, or even tenuous markers like tattoos or family affiliations.”
But Abhi Kambli, a former Justice Department official, said Boardman was speculating on hypothetical misapplications of the order — not ruling on the order’s legal validity in cases where someone genuinely is an alien enemy.
“SHE BOUGHT INTO PLAINTIFF SPECULATION THAT MAYBE THEY’LL GET IT WRONG THIS TIME, AND THEN THAT’LL AFFECT THEIR KIDS, AND THEN THAT’S WHY IT SHOULD GET BARRED.”
“Legally, where that falls short is that it’s a facial challenge to the entire executive order,” Kambli told Fox News Digital. “So, in legal terms, when something’s a facial challenge, you have to demonstrate that it’s unlawful in all of its applications, and not just the edge, the borderline cases.”
Boardman used the First Circuit’s language to find that denying citizenship under the executive order would cause irreparable harm — one of the requirements for issuing a preliminary injunction. She wrote that the loss of birthright citizenship “will ‘very likely leave permanent scars’ on the child and their family.”
Monica, one of the plaintiffs, celebrated the ruling in a statement: “During my pregnancy, I felt so much anxiety over the fact that my child could be born stateless. For now, my child and children like mine are protected and guaranteed U.S. citizenship. But I know this isn’t over. The threat to birthright citizenship is still out there.”
Shana Khader, legal director at We Are CASA, the group that filed the lawsuit, said in a statement: “When it comes to attacking birthright citizenship, the Trump administration has lost before this court, lost before the Supreme Court, and lost again today.”
The case now heads back to the appeals process — with the Trump administration expected to challenge the injunction and push the issue back toward the Supreme Court.
