For the second time in 2026, President Donald Trump has tried to end birthright citizenship by executive order – and the same legal team that defeated his first attempt is now asking a federal judge to shut the new effort down before it can take hold. On Tuesday, August 11, the American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of civil rights groups filed in federal court in Concord, New Hampshire, urging the presiding judge to confirm that Trump’s latest order is already blocked by an existing injunction and by the Supreme Court’s June ruling.
Crucially, no court has yet ruled on the new order. The August 11 filing is a request – an ask that the judge clarify the second order cannot be used to sidestep protections that are already in place. The 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship for nearly everyone born on U.S. soil remains fully intact.
What the New Order Does
On August 6, Trump signed a new executive order, along with a related “birth tourism” order, aiming to deny citizenship to specific categories of children born in the United States. According to the text of the order, the targeted groups include children born to an “alien enemy,” to a foreign-government employee, or to a parent who “engaged in a commercial transaction” to obtain citizenship for their child.
It is a narrower carve-out than his first sweeping attempt, which sought to strip citizenship from a much broader class of children. But civil rights attorneys say the goal is the same: to rewrite, by presidential signature, a constitutional guarantee that has stood for more than 150 years.
The First Order Was Already Struck Down
This is not the administration’s first courtroom defeat on the issue. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s first birthright citizenship order in a 6-3 decision. That ruling, combined with a standing injunction out of the New Hampshire federal court, is exactly what the plaintiffs are now pointing to.
Rather than launch an entirely new lawsuit, the ACLU and its partners returned to the same court and asked the judge to affirm that the second order runs into the same legal wall. Their argument is direct: a president cannot reissue an order a court has already blocked and expect a different outcome simply because the wording has changed.
Reactions and What Comes Next
The judge has not yet ruled on the new filing. If the court agrees with the plaintiffs, the second order would be confirmed as blocked without a lengthy new trial. If the administration pushes back, the fight could once again climb toward the Supreme Court – which has already weighed in once this year.
Legal scholars have long held that birthright citizenship is enshrined in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, and cannot be undone by executive action alone. Supporters of the order argue the president is targeting narrow abuses; critics counter that no amount of narrowing changes the core constitutional problem.
What This Means for Americans
For families across the country, the takeaway is that birthright citizenship remains the law of the land today. Nothing about the August 6 order changes a child’s status right now. But the repeated attempts underscore a broader question of accountability: how many times can an executive action already rejected by the courts be reintroduced in a new form? For now, the defense of the 14th Amendment rests with a federal judge in New Hampshire.
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