By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

A federal judge blocked President Trump’s new executive orders restricting birthright citizenship, the administration’s second defeat on the same question in three months.

The Supreme Court settled the constitutional question in June. The White House rewrote its order to try again, and a court has now told it the answer has not changed.

What the judge did

• Judge Deborah Boardman issued a preliminary injunction on September 2, blocking enforcement of the new orders against a certified class of children born on US soil to parents who are here unlawfully or on temporary visas.
• She grounded it in precedent, not preference. “The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are ‘citizens at birth,’” Boardman wrote, calling the new order “almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the certified class.”
• The class is specific. The certified group covers children born on US soil on or after February 19, 2025, to parents here unlawfully or on temporary visas, excluding American Samoa, in the case captioned CASA v. Trump.

This is the sequel, and it landed the same way. The court had already blocked the first order; it has now blocked the rewrite.

The backstory

The Supreme Court decided this on the merits in June. In Trump v. Barbara, decided June 30, the justices held that children born in the United States to unlawfully present or temporary-visa parents are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and are citizens at birth, striking down Trump’s original January 2025 order.

The August rewrite tried to find daylight. The two orders signed August 6 targeted narrower categories: “birth tourism,” people entering on a visa specifically to give birth, children of foreign-government staff with diplomatic immunity, and children of designated terrorists and cartel members.

What they’re saying

• The Justice Department says the new orders fit the exceptions. It argued the August orders comply with Barbara because they reach only the narrow categories the Fourteenth Amendment was never understood to cover, and that the suit was premature.
• Boardman was unmoved. She wrote that the court “must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them.”

The argument

There is a serious originalist case, and it lost in June. Reasonable people read “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to exclude the children of those with no lawful tie to the country, and birth tourism is a real abuse worth ending. That argument had its day at the Supreme Court and did not prevail.

The rule of law cuts both ways. Conservatives who cheer when courts hold the line against executive overreach cannot ask those same courts to ignore a Supreme Court ruling because, this time, it is our President testing the limits. A precedent is binding whether or not it went your way, and the honest path to changing birthright citizenship now runs through a constitutional amendment, not a second executive order.

Worth watching

An appeal is the likely next step, and the administration has defended the orders as lawful, though it has not said it will file. The bigger fight is over how much a June ruling actually forecloses. The White House is betting the Court left room for narrow exceptions. Two courts have now said it did not, and the third answer will come from the same nine justices who already gave the first one.

-The Editors

Politics · Upstream of the Swamp · September 3, 2026

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