Trump Signed New Citizenship Exclusions 37 Days After Losing at the Supreme Court

He Ordered It, Then Ordered It Again

Sarah was born in Utah in April 2025.¹ Her mother, Susan, held a student visa.¹ Susan had applied for Sarah's passport, and her three other children were all citizens.¹ On his first day back in office, Donald Trump had ordered every federal agency to stop issuing documents recognizing the citizenship of children like Sarah.² Courts blocked the order, and the Supreme Court ruled that those children were citizens at birth.³ Trump signed a second order 37 days later, setting new categories for denying citizenship recognition.⁴

The charge is abuse of presidential power: Trump ordered the federal agencies that document citizenship to withhold its recognition, then renewed that effort after the Supreme Court had answered him.²⁴³⁵ Both commands came from Trump himself.²⁴ He had promised the policy before taking office: when NBC's Kristen Welker said he had promised to end birthright citizenship on day one, he answered, "Correct."⁶

On January 20, 2025, he signed Executive Order 14160, directing every federal agency to stop issuing or accepting documents recognizing citizenship for two groups of U.S.-born children.²³ It covered children whose mothers were in the country unlawfully, and children whose mothers were here lawfully but temporarily, on a student, work or tourist visa for example; in either group, the father had to be neither a citizen nor a lawful permanent resident.² The order applied only to births more than 30 days after signing.² It directed the Secretary of State, Attorney General, Homeland Security Secretary and Social Security Commissioner to bring their agencies into line.²

The Children Behind the Case

Sarah, Susan and Matthew are pseudonyms from a July 2025 ruling by Joseph Laplante, a federal judge in New Hampshire.¹ Susan, who is Taiwanese, had lived in the United States for 12 years and was applying for permanent residence; Sarah's father was neither a citizen nor a permanent resident.¹ Another child in the case, Matthew, was born in Florida in March 2025; his Brazilian father was seeking permanent residence, his mother lacked lawful status, and Matthew had already received a U.S. passport.¹

Laplante found credible evidence estimating that the first order would deny citizenship to thousands of children.¹ He concluded that denying citizenship even temporarily would inflict irreparable harm: it would leave the children undocumented or stateless and put them at risk of deportation to countries they had never visited.¹

The first order did not achieve its stated policy of withholding citizenship recognition: USCIS's July 2025 plan acknowledged that an injunction prevented implementation, and even Justice Clarence Thomas, dissenting at the Supreme Court, recounted that courts stopped the order before it took effect or agencies implemented it.²⁷³ The courts protected the children; the threatened deprivation was the reason their families had to sue.¹

A Right His Government Had Recognized for Decades

Trump's order reversed the executive branch's own interpretation.⁸³ His Solicitor General told the Supreme Court that parts of the executive branch had misread the Citizenship Clause since the Roosevelt administration and that Trump's order corrected the mistake.⁸

The Fourteenth Amendment makes persons born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction citizens, and Congress repeated that rule in the nationality statute.⁹² In 1898, United States v. Wong Kim Ark held that an American-born child of Chinese subjects was a citizen and described a broad rule of citizenship by birth, with narrow exceptions including foreign diplomats and enemies in hostile occupation.¹⁰

Judge Leo Sorokin of Massachusetts, one of the federal judges who blocked the order, noted that the executive branch had applied the broader citizenship rule even during Trump's first term.¹¹ The Justice Department had faced a similar bill in 1995.¹² Walter Dellinger, speaking for its Office of Legal Counsel, told Congress that citizenship by birth could be changed only by constitutional amendment.¹² His office, he said, handles many difficult and close constitutional questions:¹²

Legislation Denying Citizenship at Birth to Certain Children Born in the United States, 19 Op. O.L.C. 340¹²

The lawfulness of this bill is not among them. This legislation is unquestionably unconstitutional.

Trump Won on Injunctions, Then Lost on Citizenship

Four federal district judges, Laplante and Sorokin among them, blocked the first order within 24 days.^13141511 Those were preliminary injunctions, protecting people while the lawsuits continued.¹³¹⁵¹¹

Trump's administration won its first Supreme Court contest.¹⁶ On June 27, 2025, in Trump v. CASA, the Court ruled six to three that universal injunctions likely exceeded the equitable authority Congress had given federal courts.¹⁶ The ruling limited the injunctions without deciding the citizenship order's constitutionality.¹⁶

On July 10, Laplante provisionally certified a nationwide class of children covered by the order and entered an injunction protecting all of them, stayed for seven days pending appeal.¹ On October 3, 2025, the First Circuit upheld the Massachusetts preliminary injunctions except insofar as they bound agencies themselves rather than agency officials.¹⁷ The administration itself asked the Supreme Court to decide the New Hampshire case before the appeals court ruled.¹⁸ On June 30, 2026, Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the Court's answer: children born here to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth under the Constitution.³ The Court affirmed Laplante's class-wide preliminary injunction.³¹

Two Trump Appointees Voted Against His Order

Two of the six votes against the order came from Justices Trump had nominated, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh.¹⁹³ Barrett joined the five-Justice majority, which held that the Constitution itself barred the order.³ Jurisdiction, the majority reasoned, meant the country's power to govern people within its territory, not their parents' immigration status.³ It acknowledged the domicile language in Wong Kim Ark but held that the Court had understood that decision for 128 years to protect all children born here and subject to American power.³ Kavanaugh supplied the sixth vote on statutory grounds.³

Trump v. Barbara, separate opinion³

In my view, the Executive Order does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Order does contravene a federal statute, 8 U. S. C. §1401(a).

Four Justices rejected the majority's constitutional reading: Kavanaugh, and dissenters Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito.³

Another Set of Exclusions

Trump signed Executive Order 14418 on August 6, 2026, three days after the Supreme Court's judgment issued and 37 days after its decision.⁴³¹⁸ He again ordered agencies to refuse citizenship documents, this time when neither parent was a citizen and one of four conditions applied.⁴ The first was a parent the order defined as an alien enemy, including members of designated terrorist organizations.⁴ The second was a parent employed by a foreign government, a category that extended beyond ambassadors to embassy and consulate employees who were nationals of the employing country, people employed by a foreign government in an official capacity, and certain international-organization employees.⁴ The third was a commercial or fraudulent arrangement to obtain citizenship through birth, expressly including paid surrogacy.⁴ The fourth was birth in a territory or territorial waters without statutory citizenship.⁴

These were different categories from the first order's two, and the new order did not mention Executive Order 14160.⁴² But Trump directed the same four officers to align their agencies' policies with his command.⁴² The same day, he signed a companion birth-tourism order that authorized visa revocation, removal and permanent entry bars within agency discretion, subject to applicable law and humanitarian or national-interest exemptions.²⁰

Citizenship Replaced With Immigration Paperwork

The Department of Homeland Security issued an interim final rule for the foreign-government-employee category, effective September 4, 2026, and described what it was changing:²¹

Interim final rule, 91 Fed. Reg. 57249²¹

This rule governs the registration of permanent resident status for children born to foreign government employees who previously would have been considered United States citizens at birth.

Before, DHS explained, the exclusion covered only the children of foreign diplomatic officers.²¹ The new rule applied only to children born on or after September 4, and excluded groups such as privately hired chauffeurs and housecleaners and certain contractors.²¹ For newly affected children, it replaced citizenship treatment with immigration registration requirements and an optional application to register permanent residence.²¹ DHS estimated the total per-person cost of the permanent-residence application route at $1,905.95 electronically or $1,993.65 on paper, including filing fees, time and biometrics.²¹ Families could instead use the ordinary alien-registration form with no filing fee, though it too involved time and biometric costs.²¹ DHS could not quantify how many children its wider rule would affect.²¹

The Social Security Administration's guidance, labeled as subject to ongoing agency discussion, said a U.S. birth certificate would no longer suffice as proof of citizenship for people covered by the order.²² Roughly 99% of original Social Security numbers assigned to newborns went through its automated birth-registration program.²² Under the proposed process, the agency would hold a baby's record if it could not verify a citizen parent, check other agencies' information, and refuse the newborn's number if the information showed an exclusion applied or a parent declined the questions.²² The plan offered parents an opportunity to dispute their status, though for an alien-enemy determination notice of the basis could be delayed while SSA awaited another agency's permission.²² The plan also called for notifying parents and updating SSA records if later agency data indicated that an exclusion applied at birth and a child's number should not have been issued.²²

SSA planned to preserve automated assignment and expected only a small portion of parents to choose an office application instead of the birth-registration program.²² The State Department's proposed passport plan would require an attestation from each parent under penalty of perjury when neither parent was a citizen.²³ These agency plans did not report individual refusals of citizenship documents.²²²³

A Judge Blocked the Renewed Threat

The Maryland plaintiffs included women who had been pregnant when they sued in January 2025 and had since given birth.⁵ After Trump's second order, they returned to Judge Deborah L. Boardman, one of the four judges who had blocked the first, to protect a class identical to the one in Barbara.⁵²⁴

Boardman found that the order's text reached children regardless of when they were born, and that Monica's and Andrea's children faced a credible threat of losing citizenship recognition through mistaken alien-enemy designations, although their parents did not belong to the designated gangs.⁵ She cited the government's record of unsupported gang classifications in removal cases as grounds for their fear.⁵

Memorandum Opinion granting a preliminary injunction, CASA, Inc. v. Trump⁵

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.

Boardman found that denial of citizenship would irreparably harm the class.⁵ The government claimed that extending federal benefits to people it considered ineligible would impose substantial costs, but Boardman found that it supplied neither supporting details nor a proposed bond amount.⁵ On September 2, she entered a preliminary injunction barring five named agency officials and those acting with them from applying the order to class members or otherwise denying recognition of their citizenship.²⁴ Her injunction bound the agencies, not Trump personally; it left them free to write guidance and did not cover the territorial exclusion.²⁴

The Defense, and Its Limit

Trump's government argued that the first order would reduce incentives for unlawful immigration and birth tourism and address national-security concerns.⁸ The order never took effect, so none of that was tested.⁷³ The government's legal theory tied citizenship to direct allegiance and a lawful, permanent home in the country.⁸ Thomas and Gorsuch defended the order at least for children whose parents were not domiciled in the United States.³ The constitutional majority rejected the government's reading.³

A President can test a disputed constitutional position: Lincoln challenged permanent judicial control of national policy while recognizing that decisions bound the parties to a suit.²⁵ Trump was a party to Barbara.³ The first order alone would make a weaker impeachment case: courts stopped it, and the legal challenge produced an answer.³¹⁸ In Andrew Johnson's 1868 impeachment, his lawyers argued that he had a right to test the Tenure of Office Act's constitutionality before the Supreme Court; the Senate acquitted him, with the conviction vote one short of the required two-thirds.²⁶ The Senate's history attributes his acquittal to a sufficient minority's wish to protect the presidency and preserve the constitutional balance of powers.²⁶

The second order's strongest defense is that it accepts Barbara and targets recognized exceptions outside that decision's rule, as the White House described them.⁴²⁷ Boardman left the categories' general validity undecided and agreed that the class definition could include ambassadors' children, who fall within an established exception.⁵ But she said the new exclusions bore "little to no resemblance" to the Supreme Court's narrow exceptions.⁵ For the class, her answer was direct: "Barbara is the law of the land. The President must follow it."⁵

Neither Barbara nor Boardman's ruling found bad faith or a disobeyed court order, and DHS promised not to apply its rule to class members while the injunction stood.³⁵²⁴²¹ On September 8, the government asked Boardman to dissolve the injunction or stay it pending appeal, citing prospective-only guidance the agencies had issued after her ruling.²⁸²⁹ It argued that Monica's and Andrea's already-born children therefore faced no threat and that a class built for the first, broader order could not support this injunction.²⁹ It also said it could still enforce the order outside the class, including against children of lawful permanent residents.²⁹ On September 22, the plaintiffs filed their opposition and moved to amend their supplement and add a class representative.³⁰ As of October 10, 2026, the public CourtListener docket, updated October 2, showed no ruling on the government's motion.³⁰

Why This Is an Impeachment Charge

Article II permits impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors.³¹ Hamilton described the relevant offenses as abuses or violations of public trust.³² The House Judiciary Committee's second Nixon article charged misuse of executive powers to violate citizens' constitutional rights.³³ Nixon complied with the Supreme Court's tapes order, yet the committee adopted impeachment articles; he resigned before a full House vote.³⁴ Compliance alone does not answer a charge about the conduct a court stopped.³⁴³³

Trump used his own signature to command the denial of citizenship recognition, lost in the Supreme Court, and then signed new exclusions.²³⁴ His agencies wrote rules replacing citizenship treatment with immigration paperwork and planned to refuse some newborns Social Security numbers.²¹²² Mothers who sued over the first order went back to court, and a judge again intervened to protect children covered by the Court's ruling.⁵ That sequence is the case for abuse of public trust: presidential power repeatedly directed against a constitutional right, after the Supreme Court had told him the children were citizens.³²³⁴⁵