EO 14418 enjoined as to the class Barbara declared citizens

Judge Deborah L. Boardman preliminarily enjoined Executive Order 14418 as applied to a certified class of children on 2 September 2026, in CASA, Inc. v. Trump, Civ. No. DLB-25-201 (D. Md.), five days after a hearing on 28 August.¹ The court wrote that 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.”¹² It enjoined the defendants “from enforcing or applying the 2026 Executive Order against any member of the certified class or from taking any other action to interfere with, deny, or fail to recognize the citizenship of any member of the certified class.”¹ This is the first ruling against the order, which was signed on 6 August and published at 91 FR 51991 on 11 August (see Two executive orders name four categories outside Barbara’s rule).³

1. Relief runs against the agencies, not against the President, and only for the class. The defendants are the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of USCIS, the Commissioner of Social Security and the United States; the court’s footnote states that “the plaintiffs are not entitled to a preliminary injunction enjoining the President, and the Court does not enjoin the President.”¹ The class is the same Rule 23(b)(2) class the court certified on 7 August 2025 — children born in the United States after 19 February 2025 to a mother unlawfully present, or lawfully but temporarily present, and a father who was neither a citizen nor a lawful permanent resident.¹⁴ Classwide relief is the route that survived Trump v. CASA, which held that universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority the Judiciary Act of 1789 conferred (see Supreme Court restricts universal injunctions in Trump v. CASA).⁵

2. Section 3(b) was carved out of the injunction, so the guidance clock ran on. “The Court also does not enjoin Section 3(b), which requires the issuance of public guidance on the implementation of the 2026 Executive Order,” the opinion states, having already noted that the guidance “has not yet issued.”¹ Section 3(b) directs “[t]he heads of all executive departments and agencies” to “issue public guidance within 30 days of the date of this order regarding this order’s implementation with respect to their operations and activities” — 30 days from 6 August, that is 5 September.³ The court added that “[i]f, after the guidance issues, the defendants have grounds to move to modify or dissolve the preliminary injunction, they may so move,” citing Rule 60(b)(5).¹⁶

3. Nothing was decided about whether the order’s four carve-outs are constitutional. The court declined “to wade into the waters of an advisory opinion on whether the Executive Order’s purported carveouts to birthright citizenship can survive a facial constitutional challenge under Barbara and Wong Kim Ark,” resolving only the as-applied question.¹ Section 2(d), the territorial category, is not enjoined at all: the plaintiffs did not challenge it and it “by its terms does not threaten to deny citizenship to any member of the class.”¹³ The court did record that after Barbara, “Wong Kim Ark still stands erect” and its common-law exceptions “were and remain the only Supreme Court-recognized exceptions to the rule of citizenship by birth.”¹⁷

4. Children already born fall inside the order’s reach, on the court’s reading, because the 2026 order omits a clause the 2025 order carried. Executive Order 14160 had limited itself to persons “born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order”; EO 14418 “does not state that it applies prospectively,” and “[t]he only fair reading of the plain language” is that it reaches any child within any Section 2 category, “which includes babies born after February 19, 2025.”¹⁸ Government counsel represented in briefing and at the 28 August hearing that the order applies only prospectively but filed no sworn statement, and the court held that “[d]efense counsel’s mid-litigation representations to the contrary cannot assuage the credible threat of enforcement against members of the class.”¹