By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-09-06 14:01:41 | Updated at 2026-09-06 15:02:29
1 hour ago
President Donald Trump (C) speaks as White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller (L) and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick look on during an event in the Oval Office of the White House on Aug. 6, 2026. Alex Wong/Getty Images
The Department of Homeland Security has expanded an existing pathway to permanent residency for certain children born in the United States to foreign government employees, although a federal court order limits its implementation.
An interim final rule that took effect on Friday replaces the term “foreign diplomatic officer” in federal regulations with the broader term “foreign government employee.”
Existing regulations allowed U.S.-born children of accredited foreign diplomats who did not acquire citizenship at birth to register as lawful permanent residents. The new rule extends that process to additional children when neither parent is a U.S. citizen and at least one was a foreign government employee at the time of the child’s birth.
Lawful permanent residents, commonly called green-card holders, are noncitizens legally authorized to live and work permanently in the United States, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The expanded definition includes certain embassy and consulate employees, people employed by foreign governments in an official capacity, and employees of international organizations possessing immunity.
It excludes personal employees of foreign officials, certain state-owned enterprise employees, contractors, third-country nationals working for foreign governments, and government employees visiting the United States in a personal capacity.
The regulation implements President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14418, which directs federal agencies not to recognize U.S. citizenship of several categories of American-born children, including those with a parent employed by a foreign government.
The legality of that order is being contested in CASA Inc. v. Trump, a class-action lawsuit brought by immigrant families and advocacy organizations challenging the administration’s birthright-citizenship restrictions.
On Sept. 2, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman issued a preliminary injunction preventing the administration from applying the order to U.S.-born children whose mothers were unlawfully or temporarily in the country and whose fathers were neither citizens nor lawful permanent residents.
“Since his second term in office began on January 20, 2025, the President has tried, through Executive Order, to upend our country’s longstanding tradition of birthright citizenship and eliminate, for large swaths of Americans, the right to citizenship by birth, a right enshrined in the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Boardman wrote.
Boardman found that the plaintiffs were likely to prove the order violated those children’s rights under the 14th Amendment. She wrote Trump’s executive order “is almost certainly unconstitutional” when applied to a certain class based on a previous Supreme Court ruling. The injunction remains in place while the lawsuit proceeds.
DHS acknowledged the ruling in its announcement, saying it would not apply the new regulation to members of the protected class unless the government obtains relief from the injunction.
The rule applies to children born on or after Sept. 4.
