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ConfirmedAs of September 5, 2026

In force now

A court has blocked the 2026 citizenship order for children of parents here on temporary status

On 2 September 2026 the United States District Court for the District of Maryland preliminarily blocked Executive Order 14418 as it applies to a certified class of children. The court's order enjoins the government "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". The class is defined by the parents' status, not by where the family lives: any child born in the United States after 19 February 2025 whose mother was unlawfully present, or whose mother's presence "was lawful but temporary", and whose father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of the birth. A parent holding H-1B, H-4, F-1 or L-1 status is lawfully but temporarily present. The court did not block two parts of the order: subsection 2(d), which it said "by its terms does not threaten to deny citizenship to any member of the class", and Section 3(b), which requires the government to publish guidance on how the order would be implemented.

What has not changed

The Fourteenth Amendment has not changed, and neither has the Supreme Court's answer to this question. The court's opinion records that in Trump v. Barbara the Supreme Court held that children born of parents "unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States" are "citizens at birth" under the Constitution, and that the decision "effectively invalidated the 2025 Executive Order as unconstitutional". Nothing about your own status changes because of any of this: an executive order about citizenship at birth does not touch an H-1B, an H-4, an F-1, an L-1, a pending green card or a filing you already have in. No agency has announced that it is refusing to recognise the citizenship of a child born here. A passport application for a US-born child is the same application it was, with the same birth certificate. And the separate DHS rule published this month about children born to foreign government employees is a different thing entirely — it concerns families of foreign government staff, not people working here on a visa.

What to do

There is nothing to file and nothing to apply for. Your child's citizenship does not depend on you doing anything. The ordinary paperwork is the only thing worth having in order: the hospital record of the birth and the state-issued birth certificate, which is the document that evidences a US birth. If a hospital, an employer, a school or any office tells you that a child born here to parents on temporary status is not a citizen, that is the moment to speak to an immigration attorney rather than to accept it — and this alert's citations are what you can put in front of them.

Next update

When the government publishes the implementation guidance the order's Section 3(b) requires, or when the court rules further — the government may ask it to modify or dissolve the injunction once that guidance exists, and the court said so.

Sources