A United States judge has rejected, for the time being, 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 the new executive order, which Trump issued on August 6, after his initial attempts to limit birthright citizenship were struck down by the Supreme Court. District Court Judge Deborah Boardman, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, declined to immediately approve the preliminary injunction, despite expressing concern about Trump’s new order.
Boardman instructed the plaintiffs — a coalition of immigrant families and advocacy groups — to address the latest executive order directly in their lawsuit, which is a continuation of an ongoing fight over birthright citizenship. She also indicated she would schedule a briefing once a revised complaint was filed, to consider the restraining order again. In 2025, Boardman was one of several judges who approved preliminary injunctions to block the first birthright citizenship order Trump signed, declaring it unlawful.
Trump has repeatedly sought to limit who can receive US citizenship at birth, as part of a broader crackdown on immigration in the country. He and his allies have argued that birthright citizenship encourages “birth tourism”, wherein parents supposedly travel to the country to give birth, as a means of securing citizenship for their baby. Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, and it guarantees that nearly all children born on US soil receive citizenship, regardless of their parents’ nationality or immigration status.
The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868, after the US Civil War, as a means of ensuring that people who were formerly enslaved were not deprived of their rights as US citizens. But over the subsequent decades, the Supreme Court has upheld its wide applicability. In the 19th-century case United States v Wong Kim Ark, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled that an American man born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco could not have his citizenship denied.
The amendment declares that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”. There are only a few exceptions, including the children of diplomats or occupying military forces. Trump, however, has argued that the children of irregular or temporary immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US and should therefore not be granted birthright citizenship.
On the very first day of his second term, on January 20, 2025, he signed an executive order barring government agencies from issuing citizenship documents to children whose parents were either “unlawfully present” in the US or whose presence was “lawful but temporary”. That initial order upended years of legal precedents, and it was almost immediately challenged in court. Critics denounced the order as a means of leaving babies effectively stateless.
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