A federal judge on Wednesday blocked US President Donald Trump's latest executive order restricting birthright citizenship, days after she declined to immediately halt the measure while allowing immigrant rights advocates to challenge it.
US District Judge Deborah Boardman in Greenbelt, Maryland, issued a preliminary injunction preventing the Trump administration from enforcing the August 6 order against members of a previously certified class.
Boardman, an appointee of former US President Joe Biden, said Trump's latest order "is almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the certified class," citing the Supreme Court's June ruling that children covered by the class are US 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," she wrote.
The injunction bars federal agencies, including the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and Social Security Administration, from interfering with or refusing to recognize the citizenship of people covered by the class action.
Judge previously declined to immediately block order
Boardman had declined on Friday to immediately block Trump's latest order because the plaintiffs' existing lawsuit did not yet address the August 6 directive. She allowed them to supplement their complaint and set an expedited schedule to challenge it.
At the time, however, Boardman questioned the order's viability and described Trump's effort to create new exceptions to birthright citizenship by executive action as unprecedented.
Justice Department attorneys argued against an injunction, saying the new order was narrower than Trump's original directive and that a challenge should wait until federal agencies issued guidance explaining how it would be implemented.
Supreme Court rejected Trump's earlier birthright citizenship order
The US Supreme Court on June 30 rejected Trump's initial effort to end birthright citizenship for children whose parents were neither American citizens nor legal permanent residents, finding that it violated the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment.
Following that decision, Trump signed the August 6 order targeting what the administration describes as "birth tourism," in which women travel to the US to give birth so their children can obtain citizenship.
The order would also deny citizenship in certain cases involving parents working for foreign governments in the US, fraud or commercial transactions aimed at obtaining citizenship, or parents classified as "alien enemies."
The Trump administration argued that the new order was narrower than the one rejected by the Supreme Court.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.