Judge Explains That Supreme Court Rulings Also Cover the Second Attempt

A federal judge in Maryland has blocked President Trump’s latest executive order limiting birthright citizenship, on the grounds that the Supreme Court decided the question about two months before the order was signed.

U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman issued the preliminary injunction on Sept. 2. Per her written opinion, the plaintiffs are likely to win because the Supreme Court has already held that the children covered here are citizens at birth, and that holding is still in effect. She did not devote much of the opinion to the specific provisions of the new order. The opinion did not appear to require it.

That is the whole legal analysis, more or less. The Supreme Court said a thing in June. The thing is still true in September. Someone had to be paid by the hour to establish this.

The order was signed Aug. 6, 2026. It was narrower than the January 2025 version, which Boardman also blocked. This one did not try to end birthright citizenship outright. It tried to grow the list of exceptions to it.

Under the order, a child born in the United States to noncitizen parents would not automatically be a citizen if either parent was an “alien enemy,” a foreign government employee, or engaged in what the administration calls birth tourism — traveling to the United States while pregnant in order to give birth here.

The existing exceptions are narrow and old. They cover children of accredited foreign diplomats and children born to a hostile occupying force. The Supreme Court laid the rule out that way in 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and has not meaningfully moved off it since. The citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is 28 words long. It has now generated roughly 20 months of continuous federal litigation, which works out to about three weeks of courtroom time per word.

The procedural history is worth a minute, because it is the actual story. Boardman denied the same request from the same plaintiff — the Maryland nonprofit CASA Inc. — the week before, on a drafting problem with the complaint. The lawyers fixed the drafting problem. She granted it this week.

She also declined to stop the government from getting ready. Agencies may keep writing guidance explaining how they would carry out the order. They may not carry it out. Somewhere in a federal building, people are being paid to complete a manual for a policy that is not allowed to happen.

The White House responded the same day. The statement is paraphrased here rather than quoted, because the wording does not vary much between statements and this one hit the standard marks: activist judge, appointed by a Democratic president, thwarting the president’s agenda. It also asserted that the order was consistent with the Supreme Court’s prior rulings on birthright citizenship. Those rulings went against the administration.

Here is the part that is easy to miss, because every individual step looks like ordinary litigation. An order is signed. A court blocks it. A narrower order is signed. A court blocks that one too. Each round costs the plaintiffs money, staff, and months. Each round also opens a window — sometimes days, sometimes longer — in which federal agencies are operating under an order that no judge has enjoined yet, because no judge has gotten to it yet. The order does not have to survive. It only has to exist for a while.

What is different this round is the calendar. The Supreme Court ruled on the merits June 30. The new order came Aug. 6. That’s 37 days total.

One thing to watch as this moves up: whether the injunction protects a certified class of plaintiffs or applies to everyone in the country. That distinction used to be academic and is now most of the fight. In 2025, in Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court sharply limited the power of district judges to issue universal injunctions — a single order protecting everybody, not just the people who sued. Since then, challengers have generally had to bundle themselves into a formal class before a judge can shield anyone beyond the named plaintiffs. Which means the practical question is no longer only whether a policy is constitutional. It is how many people a given judge is permitted to keep it away from.

The administration has not said whether it will appeal. About 3.6 million people are born in the United States each year, and every one of them is currently a bystander to a scheduling dispute.