WASHINGTON — A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from carrying out for now the president’s latest effort to impose new limits on automatic birthright citizenship after losing an earlier legal fight before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In an order on Wednesday, a U.S. judge in Maryland ruled that President Donald Trump’s August executive order expanding the categories of noncitizen parents whose children would be ineligible for citizenship is likely unlawful as applied to a nationwide class of families whose legal status was already at issue in earlier court fights. The new exclusions would include anyone who took part in a “commercial transaction to ensure” they give birth in the U.S.

The fresh setback to Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda puts the fight over birthright citizenship on a path to return to the Supreme Court. The U.S. Justice Department next could ask a federal appeals court to lift the district judge’s order and allow officials to move ahead with implementing the president’s plan while the legal fights continue to play out.

The Supreme Court “already decided that the children in the class are citizens at birth,” U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman wrote in her decision imposing a preliminary injunction. “This court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the president’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them.”

Boardman wrote that the administration had advanced a “distorted interpretation” of the high court ruling striking down Trump’s original executive order to restrict birthright citizenship. She said the president’s latest action would deny the status to members of the class she’d already certified covering children of noncitizen parents who aren’t legally in the U.S. or who are in the country on temporary visas.

Spokespeople for the White House and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Shana Khader, legal director at We Are CASA, one of the groups that brought the case in Maryland, said in a statement that “the White House must recognize it will not succeed in stripping children of their right to citizenship, evading binding court decisions or placing the president’s anti-immigrant agenda above the Constitution.”

The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s original executive order curbing birthright citizenship in June, a major rebuke from a conservative-majority bench that has largely sided with the administration over the past year and a half.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority at the time. “The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.”

Trump vowed to look for other ways to limit citizenship. He signed two executive orders in early August targeting so-called “birth tourism,” a term that the administration has used to refer to noncitizens coming to the U.S. with the goal of obtaining citizenship for their children.

One of those orders, which isn’t central to the latest legal challenges, directs U.S. agencies to adopt rules or update existing policies to let immigration authorities deny or revoke visas, or otherwise turn away foreign nationals coming to the U.S. “for the purpose of giving birth on American soil.”

The second order addresses the categories of individuals whose children aren’t eligible for citizenship. In addition to the “commercial transaction” exclusion, the order calls for new carve-outs for babies born in the U.S. to a broader class of foreign nationals who work for their governments or other international organizations in the U.S., are members of designated terrorist groups or who engage in fraud.

Opponents accused the administration of ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling and once again trying to rewrite the Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship to nearly every person born on U.S. soil. They filed challenges to the president’s new policy as part of earlier class action lawsuits in New Hampshire and Maryland contesting Trump’s original, now-defunct citizenship restrictions.

The judge in New Hampshire is also weighing a request to block Trump from carrying out key parts of the new executive order.

The Justice Department argued the challengers lacked legal standing because they hadn’t shown the existing class actions covered families affected by the president’s latest action. The government also claimed the challenges were premature because federal agencies haven’t taken steps yet to implement Trump’s order yet and the Supreme Court didn’t definitively rule out the possibility of expanding exceptions to birthright citizenship.

The case is Casa Inc. v. Trump, 25-cv-201, U.S. District Court, District of Maryland (Greenbelt).

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