Court Cases

On September 30, 2025, the ACLU of New Hampshire filed a class action lawsuit challenging New Hampshire’s law against “loitering or prowling,” which makes innocent behaviors illegal—like standing, walking, resting, or congregating in public—based on the mere hunch of a police officer. This lawsuit follows a two-year investigation conducted by the ACLU of NH into how the loitering law has been enforced in New Hampshire. According to the ACLU of NH’s filing, the law is unconstitutional because it violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process provisions and the Fourth Amendment’s right against unreasonable seizures. Hundreds of individuals are charged under this law each year in New Hampshire and are then subjected to judicial proceedings in which they often are not entitled to counsel. Based on data from the New Hampshire court system, for the twelve years from January 1, 2013 to December 31, 2024, approximately 2,364 cases were filed in which a loitering violation was charged—an average rate of approximately 197 filed cases per year. New Hampshire’s loitering law is an outlier: it appears that New Hampshire is only one of five states (including Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, and Georgia) with this type of loitering law. Just last year, the Delaware Attorney General agreed to not enforce Delaware’s loitering law because of constitutional concerns. Loitering statutes and other vagrancy laws have historically been used in the United States to discriminate against marginalized communities. New Hampshire’s law has broad prohibitions on innocent behaviors that have allowed police to target and arrest those deemed “undesirable,” while leaving Granite Staters guessing as to what behavior is allowed and what is not under the law. Police in New Hampshire have repeatedly used this law to harass and punish unhoused people. From July 1, 2021 to December 31, 2024, there were approximately 89 cases disposed of in circuit court in which the Manchester Police Department charged a loitering violation. Of those 89 cases, at least 50 involved unhoused individuals (totaling approximately 56% of cases), despite unhoused people making up only around 0.5% of Manchester’s population. Similarly, in Concord, during the two-year period from July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2023, there were approximately 23 cases disposed of in circuit court in which the Concord Police Department charged a loitering violation. Of those 23 cases, around ten cases involved unhoused individuals (totaling approximately 43% of cases). Many examples of unhoused individuals charged under this law by the Manchester Police Department include those who were outside a corporate office building, walking in an alleyway, sleeping in front of an entryway of a church, and sleeping near the stairs of a parking garage. The unhoused community has been aggressively targeted by local governments since the United States Supreme Court’s decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which held that the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments clause did not prevent an Oregon city from enforcing an ordinance restricting camping in public spaces against unhoused individuals, even where they had no alternative place to sleep. In the year that followed the Supreme Court’s decision, cities across the country introduced over 320 bills criminalizing homelessness, nearly 220 of which passed. New Hampshire was no exception, with the City of Manchester enacting and enforcing a new camping ban. Within the last year since the Grants Pass decision, from July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025, there were approximately 243 cases filed in which a loitering violation was charged—a 60-case (or over 32%) increase from the prior year. This targeting of the unhoused has also occurred at the federal level. On March 28, 2025, President Donald J. Trump issued an Executive Order which, among other things, directed “the removal and cleanup of all homeless or vagrant encampments and graffiti on Federal land within the District of Columbia.” On July 24, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that seeks to “fight[] vagrancy” by “[s]hifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment.” The order also instructs federal agencies to reward cities and states that “enforce prohibitions on urban camping and loitering.”

In September 2025, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, together with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, the ACLU of New Hampshire, the ACLU of Maine, the law firm Araujo and Fisher, the law firm Foley Hoag, and the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic, filed a class action lawsuit in federal court to challenge the widespread denial of bond hearings to people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As the complaint demonstrates, this denial upends decades of settled law and established practice in immigration proceedings. The complaint alleges that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice recently and abruptly began to misclassify people arrested by ICE inside the United States. DHS and DOJ started systematically reclassifying these people from the statutory authority of 8 U.S.C. § 1226, which usually allows for the opportunity to request bond during removal proceedings, to the no-bond detention provisions of 8 U.S.C. § 1225, which does not apply to people arrested in the interior of the United States and placed in removal proceedings. This case is brought on behalf of Jose Arnulfo Guerrero Orellana and a putative class of similarly situated individuals. Mr. Guerrero Orellana has been living in the United States for over a decade. He brings this case to vindicate his own right to a bond hearing — where an immigration judge can determine whether his detention is justified to protect the community or ensure his appearance in court — and that of thousands of other detainees in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, and New Hampshire who will be denied the opportunity to seek release on bond under the new legal ruling adopted by the executive branch. The complaint alleges that the government's new policy violates constitutional and statutory due process rights as well as the Administrative Procedure Act. On October 3, 2025, the Court issued a preliminary injunction for the individual plaintiff. The Court ordered that "the government release" the plaintiff "unless he is provided a bond hearing that complies with the standards outlined in Hernandez-Lara v. Lyons, 10 F.4th 19 (1st Cir. 2021), within seven business days of the date of this order."

On August 7, 2025, a diverse group of educators and advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit challenging a new anti-equity, anti-inclusion, and anti-diversity law in New Hampshire, which became effective on July 1, 2025, after being signed into law by Governor Ayotte in late June. The law, contained within House Bill 2’s budget provisions, seeks to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion programs pertaining to race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability in New Hampshire schools (including both K-12 public schools as well as both public and private colleges and universities) and public entities like police departments and libraries. This law radically contradicts federal civil rights laws that protect the rights of students with disabilities, violates the First Amendment rights of educators and students, and is vague and ambiguous under the United States and New Hampshire Constitutions. The lawsuit was brought by the state’s largest educator union, National Education Association – New Hampshire (NEA-NH), four school districts (Oyster River Cooperative School District, the Dover School District, the Somersworth School District, and the Grantham School District), trainer and consultant for diversity, equity, and inclusion James M. McKim, Jr., diversity, equity, and inclusion administrator and psychology professor Dottie Morris, and New Hampshire Outright, a nonprofit that provides training in public schools and entities on creating environments of inclusion and belonging for LGBTQ+ students. They are represented by lawyers from a broad coalition of organizations and law firms, including the ACLU of New Hampshire, the national ACLU’s Disability Rights Program and Racial Justice Program, National Education Association-New Hampshire (NEA-NH), GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD Law), and Drummond Woodsum & MacMahon. The law does not just seek to prohibit diversity, equity, and inclusion in public entities and public schools, but it also seeks to strip away millions of dollars in critical state (and possibly federal) public funding if K-12 public school districts guess wrong as to how the New Hampshire Department of Education interprets the vague law’s provisions. According to one estimate, state aid to school districts could amount to more than $1 billion annually. The law is already arbitrarily and selectively being enforced by the state Department of Education, which is aggressively applying it to private (including religious) colleges and universities that receive student scholarship funds through state grant aid programs (like UNIQUE Program state grants and the Governor’s Scholarship), but apparently not private K-12 schools (including religious schools) that receive public funds through Education Freedom Accounts. The law also applies to private colleges and universities (for example, Dartmouth College, Southern New Hampshire University, and Saint Anselm College) that receive any form of state funding, including those that receive state scholarship grants that help New Hampshire residents attend these colleges. The lawsuit also raises concerns about how this law could impact school districts’ federally-mandated collection of demographic data, including racial and ethnic groups, in New Hampshire. As the law was still making its way through the legislative process, disability rights advocates expressed clear concerns that essential services, programs, and trainings aimed at helping the lives of people with disabilities could be dismantled by the law. The legislature failed to address these concerns in the final bill language that was ultimately signed into law. This lawsuit follows several others filed in New Hampshire challenging anti-equity practices in education, including a 2021 lawsuit against a classroom censorship law that was struck down in federal court in May 2024, and one lawsuit filed on March 5, 2025 in New Hampshire by the ACLU of New Hampshire, national ACLU, NEA, and NEA-NH against the U.S. Department of Education. These practices were halted by the court in April 2024. On September 4, 2025, the Court issued a temporary restraining order enjoining enforcement of the law until September 18. The temporary restraining order covers the four plaintiff school districts (Oyster River Cooperative School District, Dover School District, Somersworth School District, and the Grantham School District), as well as any other “public school” defined under the law (which includes colleges and universities) that employs, contracts with, or works with plaintiffs NEA-NH or its members, consultant and trainer James T. McKim, educator Dottie Morris, or New Hampshire Outright. The order also covers any other public school district that provides services to a student of the four plaintiff school districts under civil rights laws protecting students with disabilities. On October 2, 2025, the Court issued a preliminary injunction order with the same scope of relief, and which will last while the case proceeds. The Court explained: “The breadth of the anti-DEI laws’ prohibition is startling. The definition of ‘DEI’ contained therein is so far-reaching that it prohibits long-accepted—even legally required—teaching and administrative practices. It is hard to imagine how schools could continue to operate at even a basic level if the laws’ prohibitions were enforced to their full extent.”

On June 27, 2025, immigrants rights’ advocates filed a new nationwide class-action lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship. The lawsuit was in response to the June 27, 2025 Supreme Court ruling that potentially opened the door for partial enforcement of the executive order. This case was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of New Hampshire, ACLU of Maine, ACLU of Massachusetts, Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus, and Democracy Defenders Fund on behalf of a proposed class of babies subject to the executive order, and their parents. The same group of organizations filed a similar suit in January 2025 in the same court, on behalf of groups with members whose babies born on U.S. soil will be denied citizenship under the order, including New Hampshire Indonesian Community Support, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and Make the Road New York. The court issued a ruling protecting members of those organizations. Three other lawsuits originally obtained nationwide injunctions protecting everyone subject to the order, but the Supreme Court’s June 27 decision narrowed those injunctions, potentially leaving some children without protection. This new case seeks protection for all families in the country, filling the gaps that may be left by the existing litigation. Birthright citizenship is the principle that every baby born in the United States is a U.S. citizen. The Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantees the citizenship of all children born in the United States (with the extremely narrow exception of children of foreign diplomats) regardless of race, color, or ancestry. Specifically, it states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” This lawsuit charges the Trump administration with flouting the Constitution, congressional intent, and longstanding Supreme Court precedent, and it is national in scope. On July 10, 2025, the Court preliminarily blocked President Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship and provisionally certified a nationwide class that protects the citizenship rights of all children born on U.S. soil.