The United Supreme Court reviewed last month Trump vs. Casa, Inc., a case challenging the legality of the Trump administration’s January 20, 2025, Executive Order 14160 (“EO”) entitled Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, that denies United States citizenship to persons born in the United States on or after February 19, 2025, whose parents were either not in lawful immigration status or held lawful nonimmigrant status at the time of the person’s birth. The Supreme Court ruled that universal and nationwide injunctions of the type issued by multiple federal district judges in Washington, Maryland, and Massachusetts to block this EO likely exceed the equitable authority of federal courts. The Supreme Court thus granted a partial stay of the universal injunctions issued by these federal judges to prevent enforcement of the EO without addressing the merits of the case. The Supreme Court ordered the lower courts that had issued these injunctions to adjust them to apply only to plaintiffs in the U.S. states challenging the EO. The named states are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.
We reported on this EO and its ongoing litigation in our Alerts on January 21, February 7, and March 17 of this year.
On July 10, 2025, a federal judge in New Hampshire certified in the case of Barbara et al v. Trump et al. a nationwide class of United States-born children challenging the legality of the EO and issued a preliminary injunction blocking the implementation of the EO throughout the United States. The injunction has been stayed for seven days to allow the government to appeal.
The nationwide class certified by the court comprises all current and future persons who were born in the United States on or after February 20, 2025, if (a) the person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (b) the person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of the person’s birth.
The court’s certification of this nationwide class is intended to avoid a geographic patchwork where children born to undocumented or nonimmigrant parents in certain states would be afforded United States citizenship, but similarly-situated children born in other states would not become United States citizens.
The federal government will certainly dispute the class certification within the seven-day deadline. If the certification is upheld by higher courts, including the Supreme Court, the administration will be prevented from implementing the EO with respect to any and all class members while litigation involving the legality of the EO progresses. This means that any and all children born in the United States will continue to be United States citizens regardless of the state in which they are born.
