A federal judge on Wednesday blocked enforcement of President Donald Trump’s executive order that aimed to restrict birthright citizenship.

The ruling, from U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman in Greenbelt, Maryland, granted immigrant rights advocates’ request for a preliminary injunction, which comes roughly two months after the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s initial effort to end birthright citizenship.

“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, a right enshrined in the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Boardman said in her Wednesday opinion.

Her decision blocks the federal government from “taking any other action to interfere with, deny, or fail to recognize the citizenship” of children of unlawful or temporary foreign nationals.

She further wrote that the executive order is “almost certainly unconstitutional” because of a Supreme Court ruling on June 30

The president signed two executive orders, Ending Birth Tourism and Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, in response about a month later.

The latter executive order sought to expand the definition of people who are ineligible for birthright citizenship.

“That includes, for instance, alien enemies of the United States, members of foreign terrorist organizations, and large categories of people who lobby and act on behalf of foreign governments,” Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, previously said.

The other order aimed to ban birth tourism, the practice of a foreign national traveling to the United States on a tourist visa with the purpose of giving birth to a child in the country so the child is guaranteed automatic U.S. citizenship.

Immigrant groups CASA and Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, which had won a preliminary injunction from Boardman last year against Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship before the Supreme Court ruling, again requested the judge block the president’s renewed effort.

The groups claimed the order was unconstitutional and “in defiance” of the high court’s order.

By contrast, the Department of Justice (DOJ) argued the new order was narrowed, unlike the sweeping 2025 one, and was only meant to apply to certain categories of individuals that the justices outlined in their decision, including babies born to terrorists or to foreign government employees.

Boardman did not issue a ruling on Aug. 28, because the immigrant groups’ original lawsuit against the 2025 order did not mention Trump’s 2026 order, so she did not block it at the time.

Government lawyers have called the lawsuit against the president’s latest order premature, because federal agencies have not yet issued any guidance on how the directive would be carried out. Any legal challenges should wait until that time comes, the DOJ argued.