President Donald Trump’s ongoing crusade against birthright citizenship – this time by banning so-called “birth tourism”– hit a stumbling block this week when a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction against his executive order on Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman of Maryland, who was nominated by then-President Joe Biden, issued the injunction on Wednesday to allow immigrant advocates to continue with their class action lawsuit and highlighted that the U.S Supreme Court has already addressed this matter.
“Since his second term in office began on January 20, 2025, the President has tried, through Executive Order, to upend our country’s longstanding tradition of birthright citizenship and eliminate, for large swaths of Americans, the right to citizenship by birth, a right enshrined in the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Boardman wrote. “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. This Court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them.”
Significance. Trump signed an executive order last month, to ban birth tourism, the act of traveling to a country to purposefully give birth there and secure citizenship in that country for a child.
“Participants in birth tourism schemes abuse these categories to establish a permanent foothold in the United States by securing the advantage of citizenship for their children and then potentially for themselves,” said Trump in his executive order.
Immigration advocacy groups, like We Are CASA, the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, and the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, responded by filing a lawsuit against the administration for what they saw as an unconstitutional abuse of power. They said that “the U.S. Supreme Court already settled this issue just two months ago in Trump v. Barbara.”
“The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are ‘citizens at birth,” Boardman wrote in her ruling.
Overlooked angle. The Trump administration has been working to dismantle both legal and undocumented immigration to the U.S. throughout his second term.
On the first day of his second term, he signed an executive order that directed government agencies to stop recognizing U.S. citizenship for people whose parents lacked legal permanent status in the U.S. That was ultimately struck down and deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on June 30 in the Trump v. Barbara case.
Power structure. Birthright citizenship is granted under the 14th Amendment and allows anyone born on U.S. soil to have citizenship, regardless of the parents’ citizenship status.
Trump’s moves to limit “birth tourism” and birthright citizenship are just a few strategies in a larger plan to suppress diversity in the U.S. population and create a majority-White nation.
What experts say. “The Supreme Court in Barbara ruled that children born to immigrant parents on U.S. soil are U.S. citizens under the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” William Powell, senior counsel at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law School, said in a statement. “That constitutional principle is foundational to our democracy, and the President cannot change it by Executive Order, no matter how many times he tries.”
