Two months after the Supreme Court gutted President Trump's first-day order ending automatic citizenship for children of illegal aliens and temporary visitors, a Maryland federal judge has now blocked the narrower follow-up that targeted the actual business model: birth tourism.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman (Biden), who already enjoined the 2025 order, issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday against the August 6 executive order titled "Ending Birth Tourism and Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship."
Boardman wrote that the new order is "almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the certified class" because the Supreme Court in Barbara v. Trump already declared those children "citizens at birth."
"The Supreme Court has spoken," she said. "Barbara is the law of the land. The President must follow it."
No executive order, she added, "can undo what the Supreme Court has done."
The injunction covers children born after February 19, 2025 - the class Boardman certified last year - including future births. State, DHS, and Social Security are barred from denying or refusing to recognize citizenship papers for that group. Children born before that date are outside this order. Agencies can still write implementation guidance. The administration had told the court that guidance was due around September 5 and that any lawsuit was premature. Boardman was not interested.
What Trump Actually Signed.
After the June 30, 2026, 6-3 loss, the White House did not try to relitigate the entire 14th Amendment in one stroke. Instead, it tried to exploit what it called leftover exceptions: children of "alien enemies," members of foreign terrorist organizations, people acting on behalf of foreign governments, and anyone who entered the United States in a "commercial transaction" to deliver a citizen.
Stephen Miller, at the Oval Office signing, called birth tourism "a fraud on the American system" and said the practice was "hereby banned." Trump said citizenship had been "made into a joke" and that "wealthy people are building businesses around it." A Birth Tourism Prevention Task Force followed. Hundreds of visas were yanked.
Boardman treated those carve-outs as a "distorted interpretation" of Barbara. The Justice Department argued the new text sat in the gaps the justices left open. She said the text was "crystal clear and ripe for challenge" and already commanded agencies to deny documents to broad categories of newborns.
This is the same court, same plaintiffs, same playbook.
CASA and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project - the groups that won the first Maryland injunction - supplemented the old case after Boardman refused a temporary restraining order on August 28 because the complaint had not even mentioned the new order. She let them amend, set a compressed briefing schedule, and then shut the policy down for the class.
White House and DOJ had not commented as of Thursday midday. An appeal to the Fourth Circuit is the next obvious move. From there the case is built to go back to the same nine justices who already told the administration the Citizenship Clause is not a policy preference.
The Underlying Fight
The 14th Amendment grants citizenship to persons "born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." For 150 years the live question has been what "jurisdiction" means - diplomats, occupying armies, and, in the administration's view, people who owe no allegiance and are here in violation of law or on a tourist visa to manufacture a citizen. Wong Kim Ark (1898) and now Barbara (2026) read it broadly. Justice Thomas, dissenting in June, said the majority "devalues" citizenship by treating it as a prize for "foreign birth tourists and illegal aliens."
Congress could still legislate. It has not. A House Judiciary panel held a hearing on the June decision the same day Boardman ruled. That is the political track. The judicial track, for now, runs through Greenbelt, Maryland.
The injunction is temporary. The class is not. Until a higher court says otherwise, the United States remains one of the last large countries where showing up pregnant on a tourist visa is still a path to a passport - unless the parents happen to fall outside Boardman's certified class, in which case the paperwork fight is just getting started.