A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump's latest effort to deny birthright citizenship by torching a "distorted" interpretation he used to justify an executive order.
In a Wednesday ruling, U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman from the District of Maryland granted a preliminary injunction halting the enforcement of an executive order Trump signed in August. The order marked his second attempt to narrow the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship by birth, the ruling noted.
Trump's executive order came just a month after the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Barbara that children born to parents "unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States" are "citizens at birth," the ruling noted. Boardman found Trump's new order tried to carve out fresh exceptions the Supreme Court never recognized.
"No Presidential Executive Order can undo what the Supreme Court has done," Boardman wrote. "The Supreme Court has spoken. Barbara is the law of the land. The President must follow it."
Boardman called Trump's order "almost certainly unconstitutional" as applied to children who are part of a "class" with certified citizenship. She wrote that the terms of Trump's order were "crystal clear and ripe for challenge."
Trump's order sought to deny citizenship to U.S.-born children whose parents fall into new categories, including those the government labels "alien enemies," foreign government employees or participants in so-called "birth tourism," the ruling explained.
"Not surprisingly, the defendants do not cite any language from Barbara to support this distorted interpretation of the opinion," Boardman wrote. "And of course there is none."
Boardman mentioned two mothers from Venezuela and Mexico whose children risk being wrongly tagged as members of designated terrorist organizations. She accused the Trump administration of misreading the Supreme Court's decision.
"Though the defendants may not like it, the Barbara Court's conclusion was clear: The children in the class 'satisfy both elements of the Citizenship Clause' — place and jurisdiction—and they are thus 'citizens at birth,'" Boardman wrote.