A U.S. judge has denied for now a request for a temporary restraining order to block President Donald Trump’s second executive order restricting birthright citizenship.
Friday’s decision was one of the first legal tests for a new executive order issued on Aug. 6 after President Trump’s first attempt to limit birthright citizenship was rejected by the Supreme Court.
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District Court Judge Deborah Boardman, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, declined to immediately approve the preliminary injunction despite expressing concerns about President Trump’s new order.
“As far as I know, this is unprecedented,” Boardman said of the order.
Boardman directed the plaintiffs, a coalition of immigrant families and advocacy groups, to directly address the latest executive order in the lawsuit, which is a continuation of the ongoing battle over birthright citizenship.
He also said he plans to schedule a briefing session to revisit the restraining order once the amended complaint is filed.
Boardman was one of several judges in 2025 to approve a preliminary injunction blocking the first birthright citizenship order signed by President Trump, declaring it illegal.
President Trump has repeatedly called for limits on who can obtain U.S. citizenship at birth as part of a broader crackdown on domestic immigration.
He and his supporters argued that birthright citizenship encourages “birth tourism,” in which parents travel to a country to give birth, as a way to secure citizenship for their babies.
constitutional rights
Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees that nearly all children born in the continental United States will receive citizenship, regardless of their parents’ citizenship or immigration status.
The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868 after the Civil War as a means to ensure that formerly enslaved people were not stripped of their rights as citizens of the United States. But in the decades since, the Supreme Court has upheld its broad applicability.
For example, in the 19th century case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court ruled that citizenship could not be denied to an American man born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants.
The amendment declares that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and who are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are nationals of the United States and of the state in which they reside.” There are only a few exceptions, such as children of diplomats and occupying forces.
However, President Trump argued that children of undocumented and temporary immigrants should not be granted birthright citizenship because they are not subject to U.S. “jurisdiction.”
On January 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, he signed an executive order prohibiting government agencies from issuing citizenship documents to children whose parents are “illegally present” in the United States or whose presence is “legal but temporary.”
This initial order overturned long-standing precedent and was almost immediately challenged in court. Critics charged that the order was a way to effectively render infants stateless.
On June 30, the Supreme Court invalidated President Trump’s 2025 Executive Order in a 6-3 decision, ruling it unconstitutional.
Issuing a secondary order
President Trump responded with his second birthright citizenship order on August 6th. The conditions were narrow in scope.
It calls for denying citizenship to children born to non-citizen parents who are considered “foreign enemies” or “terrorists.” Children of parents who “engage in commerce” to obtain birthright citizenship or to ensure that their pregnant mothers give birth in the United States would also be stripped of their citizenship under the law.
Children of people from American Samoa, a U.S. territory that federal law does not grant citizenship to, are also ineligible.
Trump defended his second executive order as a way to protect against “the risks posed by malign foreign powers that seek to exploit our generosity to defraud the American people.”
But critics charged that the second executive order was another attempt to strip immigrant children of basic civil rights.
A coalition of immigrant families and rights groups, including We Are CASA and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, has vowed to fight the new order as much as the first.
“It is within the scope of this lawsuit that the court will restrain the defendants from stripping class members of their citizenship, no matter how many times the President, who has no authority to change birthright citizenship laws, may direct them,” the coalition’s lawyers wrote in an Aug. 24 memo seeking the injunction.
“It is not the power of the executive branch to determine who is a U.S.-born citizen.”
But the memo also argued that there was no need for coalition members to “amend the complaint before the court issues further injunctive relief,” given that the principle behind the case remains unchanged: the president cannot deny citizenship to children born on U.S. soil.
“No matter how many overlapping executive orders the president issues in an attempt to invalidate the Constitution, they have the right to have their citizenship recognized by the executive branch,” the document reads.
The lawsuit, which includes an application to modify the preliminary injunction, is expected to continue.
