Trump birthright plan blocked as judge calls US case 'blasé'

Erik Larson, Bloomberg News on Jul 25, 2025

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President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship was blocked nationwide for the third time in less than a month, the latest sign that a U.S. Supreme Court ruling restricting “universal injunctions” is having little impact on the dispute.

The injunctions set up another round of appeals that may ultimately be resolved by the Supreme Court, which has largely backed Trump in his crackdown on immigration. The justices haven’t yet taken up the question of whether the birthright citizenship order is constitutional.

U.S. Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston ruled Friday that an injunction pausing Trump’s order nationwide is the only way to offer full protection to the 18 Democratic-led states that filed the suit. He criticized the government for failing to offer “feasible or workable” details about how a narrower injunction could be implemented across federal agencies.

“The defendants have done nothing to assure the court that they fully grasp the potentially sweeping and disruptive effects of any misstep in implementation,” Sorokin wrote. “With stakes this high, the court simply cannot adopt the defendants’ blasé approach to the details and workability of a more limited injunction.”

The states and groups that sued say the executive order violates the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment. It was enacted after the Civil War to ensure citizenship for the children of formerly enslaved Americans, but for more than a century has been interpreted to grant citizenship to virtually every baby born on U.S. soil.

“These courts are misinterpreting the purpose and the text of the 14th Amendment,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “We look forward to being vindicated on appeal.”

Trump’s order would restrict citizenship to babies with at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or green card holder. The government says the directive closes a loophole that encourages illegal immigration.

A nationwide injunction protecting all affected babies was granted in a class-action suit in New Hampshire on July 10, while a federal appeals court this week upheld a similar block in a suit brought by four Democratic-led states. The new ruling comes in a suit brought by 18 states. A judge in a separate class-action suit is weighing another potential injunction.

The states argued they would suffer significant financial harm if the executive order took effect, due to the complexities of a patchwork system of citizenship that require state employees to verify citizenship for a wide variety of social-service programs that receive federal funding. Such a system would require costly training and systems updates in every state, they said.

Sorokin, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, said that “shifting citizenship status” based on where a child is born in the U.S. “is a state of affairs without precedent in this country for at least 150 years.”

“Federal law and state systems are not designed to respond easily to such a regime,” he said.

Trump’s order was initially put on hold months ago in three separate cases. But the Supreme Court on June 27 paused those orders after ruling that judges generally can’t issue nationwide injunctions that block federal policies outright.

The justices returned the cases to the lower courts to weigh whether their injunctions needed to be narrowed or amended so that they provide relief only to the people or groups that sued.

The Supreme Court’s opinion, hailed as a major victory by the Trump administration, hasn’t stopped judges from finding that broad injunctions against the birthright citizenship order are still necessary to protect U.S.-born children of migrants while the cases proceed.

In their request to maintain a nationwide injunction, the Democratic-led states said the Supreme Court’s finding on so-called universal injunctions “has no bearing on this case.” The states argued that a nationwide injunction is the only way to prevent harm that they say would be caused by allowing the executive order to take effect in some states, creating a chaotic patchwork of citizenship.

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