A Biden-appointed federal judge torched President Trump's latest bid to crack down on birthright citizenship Wednesday — and the White House fired right back, branding the ruling the work of an "activist judge" hell-bent on derailing the commander-in-chief's agenda.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman, sitting in Maryland, slapped a preliminary injunction on key chunks of Trump's August executive order, writing in a blistering 35-page opinion that the directive is "almost certainly unconstitutional" and defies a Supreme Court ruling from just two months ago.
"The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are 'citizens at birth,'" Boardman wrote. "Barbara is the law of the land. The President must follow it."
'Activist judge appointed by Biden'
The White House didn't mince words.
"This is just another ruling from an activist judge appointed by Biden attempting to thwart President Trump's commonsense agenda," a White House spokesperson said Thursday.
The broadside sets the stage for yet another high-stakes legal brawl over who gets to be an American — a fight that has ping-ponged between lower courts and the Supreme Court since Trump's first day back in office.
Trump signed the narrower August order after the high court gutted his sweeping Day 1 directive, which had tried to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented and temporary immigrants. The new version zeroed in on so-called "birth tourism" and the American-born children of "alien enemies" — a category the administration defines to include members of designated terror groups and drug cartels.
Boardman wasn't buying it.
"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," she wrote.
Supreme Court already weighed in
The judge leaned hard on the Supreme Court's June decision in Trump v. Barbara, which held that children born on U.S. soil to parents who are unlawfully or only temporarily present are protected by the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and are "citizens at birth."
"No Presidential Executive Order can undo what the Supreme Court has done," Boardman wrote.
The injunction — which took effect immediately — bars federal agencies including the State Department, Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration from denying citizenship to the children covered by the lawsuit while the case plays out. It does not strike down the entire order nationwide, and the administration is free to keep drafting implementation guidance.
'We'll continue to fight'
The Justice Department is expected to appeal, teeing up what could become the administration's second trip to the Supreme Court over birthright citizenship in under a year.
Abhi Kambli, a former Justice Department official, said Boardman was right to flag that the administration could wrongly strip citizenship from someone based on a foreign-terrorist-organization designation.
"The White House must recognize it will not succeed in stripping children of their right to citizenship, evading binding court decisions or placing the president's anti-immigrant agenda above the Constitution," Kambli said.
Immigrant-rights advocates cheered the ruling as a lifeline for thousands of families.
"When I joined this lawsuit, I was two months pregnant and terrified that the government would refuse to recognize my baby as a citizen simply because we are an immigrant family," said Juana, a member of We Are CASA and a class representative in the case. "Today's decision gives me relief because my child and thousands of other children remain protected."
What the Constitution says
The fight turns on the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 in the ashes of the Civil War: "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."
Boardman traced more than a century of precedent — back to the landmark 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark — concluding that the Constitution guarantees citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil, with only narrow exceptions for children of foreign diplomats.
For now, the lower courts are bound by the Supreme Court's ruling — and so, Boardman made clear, is the president.
I News Australia is an officially accredited member of the United States Media Delegation and the White House Press Pool.
