Just five days after President Donald Trump signed a new executive order that seeks to narrow the availability of birthright citizenship – the current guarantee of automatic citizenship to almost all babies born in the United States – lawyers for the plaintiffs who successfully challenged Trump’s earlier order restricting birthright citizenship returned to federal court in New Hampshire. In a motion filed on Tuesday morning, lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups urged U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante to clarify that the new order goes beyond the limited exception – for foreign diplomats – to birthright citizenship that the Supreme Court reaffirmed in its June 30 decision in Trump v. Barbara.

Trump’s first attempt to end birthright citizenship came at the beginning of his second term, when he signed an executive order that prohibited children whose parents were either undocumented immigrants or only in the United States temporarily from gaining automatic U.S. citizenship.

On the last day before the court’s summer recess, a majority of the court ruled that Trump’s 2025 order violated the Constitution. In his opinion for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which grants citizenship to anyone “born … in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” sweeps broadly, subject only to a few “narrow exceptions” for “the children of foreign ministers and members of” some “19th-century Indian tribes.”

Challenge brought to Trump’s new birthright citizenship order | SCOTUSblog