A New Hampshire resident is at the center of a challenge to the Trump administration’s restrictions on birthright citizenship.
The lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit, identified under the pseudonym “Barbara” in court documents, is an asylum-seeker from Honduras living in New Hampshire with her husband and three children.
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on her case Wednesday and appeared ready to reject the restrictions laid out by President Donald Trump, as reported by the Associated Press.
Barbara came to the U.S. in 2024, and her asylum application with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is still pending, according to court documents. When the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU of New Hampshire last June, she was pregnant with a fourth child, due in October 2025.
Babies born on U.S. soil were automatically granted citizenship until Trump issued an executive order last year restricting who qualifies. According to that order, the child would not receive citizenship if the mother is in the country illegally and their father is not a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the U.S.
Under those requirements, the lawsuit states, Barbara worried that her baby would not be granted citizenship.
“She fears her child will be unjustly denied the security, rights, and opportunities that come with U.S. citizenship, leaving their future in doubt,” according to the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs are among a coalition of organizations that joined the lawsuit, including the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire. The ACLU’s national legal director, Cecillia Wang, argued before the Supreme Court and said she “couldn’t be more confident” that justices would strike down Trump’s order.
SangYeob Kim, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the ACLU-New Hampshire, is serving as co-counsel on the case.
“Our Constitution and the more than a century of court decisions on this topic are overwhelmingly clear: no politician can decide who among those born in this country is worthy of citizenship,” Kim said in a statement following the court arguments. “We are fighting this cruel executive order to ensure that every child born in the United States has their right to citizenship protected instead of being relegated to a permanent, multigenerational subclass of people born in the U.S. but who are denied full rights.”
The birthright citizenship order, which Trump signed on the first day of his second term, is part of his administration’s broad immigration crackdown.
Birthright citizenship is the first Trump immigration-related policy to reach the court for a final ruling. The justices previously struck down global tariffs Trump had imposed under an emergency powers law that had never been used that way.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
