Court Cases

In Claremont School District v. Governor, the New Hampshire Supreme Court interpreted the state constitution to include an enforceable right to an adequate education. In subsequent decisions, the Court further interpreted the State’s corresponding obligations: (1) defining an adequate education, (2) determining the cost of providing that education, (3) funding that cost through taxes, and (4) establishing a system of accountability to ensure schools are meeting education standards and performance. In this appeal, the State of New Hampshire asks the Court to overturn Claremont and its progeny, arguing that those decisions misinterpret the New Hampshire Constitution and have proved unworkable for the government. Alternatively, the State also argues that the political question doctrine prevents courts from reviewing the State’s decisions about defining and funding an adequate education. On November 3, 2026, the ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, the ACLU of New Hampshire, and the National Education Association-New Hampshire filed an amicus brief arguing that the Court’s version of stare decisis weighs against overturning decades of established precedent. Our brief emphasizes that municipalities, school systems, and individual Granite Staters have come to rely on the guarantees of Claremont and its progeny. Overturning these cases would upend settled expectations, and property-poor communities and communities of color would bear the brunt of the consequences. Our brief also explains that the Court’s existing framework for recognizing a state constitutional right to an adequate education is both legally sound and still workable. To demonstrate this, our brief examines courts in other states who have recognized state constitutional rights to education and imposed requirements analogous to the four obligations established in New Hampshire.

On September 28, 2026, immigrants’ rights advocates filed a federal lawsuit challenging President Trump’s new executive order targeting birthright citizenship. The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of New Hampshire, ACLU of Maine, ACLU of Massachusetts, ACLU of the District of Columbia, Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus, and Democracy Defenders Fund on behalf of people subjected to the new executive order. The groups already secured a major Supreme Court victory in June in Trump v. Barbara protecting babies who would have been denied citizenship under Trump’s first failed executive order concerning birthright citizenship. In its ruling, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause puts “the question of citizenship ‘once and forever [to] rest.’” Despite that, the administration is again trying to restrict birthright citizenship, prompting today’s legal action. The groups had initially sought to block the new executive order in the existing Barbara case, which was filed in New Hampshire. After the judge in that case indicated that he viewed this challenge as a new lawsuit, the groups withdrew their requests in Barbara and filed this new lawsuit. The lawsuit, Nathan v. Trump, was filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C.

On October 1, 2026, GLAD Law, the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, and the ACLU of New Hampshire filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to stop the Trump administration from enforcing a rule against our clients that will take medical care away from transgender youth in low-income families. The rule was issued in August 2026 by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Effective October 13, 2026, it cuts off federal Medicaid and CHIP funding for medications and other treatment for gender dysphoria for young people. The ban applies even when a patient’s own doctor has determined the care is medically necessary. We are filing on behalf of four New Hampshire teenagers and their families. These are kids who are already in treatment. Their families made these medical decisions with their doctors, based on careful assessment of their children’s medical needs. But, on October 13, the Trump administration plans to pull the funding for these kids’ health care mid-treatment, with no plan for what happens to them.  Stopping treatment abruptly, against the judgment of these children’s own parents and doctors, will hurt these kids. Not only is this rule cruel, but it is also illegal. Congress created the Medicaid program 50 years ago, and the regulations governing Medicaid say that it can’t deny a covered service because of a patient’s diagnosis. But that’s exactly what this rule does. More than 90% of the public comments submitted about this rule opposed it. The law says the government must engage with this evidence, not wave it away, before implementing any new regulation. But the Trump administration ignored both the people’s voice and the law, and forged ahead anyway.

On September 2, 2026, residents of housing developments owned and maintained by the Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority (CHRA) in New Hampshire sued to block CHRA from harvesting sweeping data about tenants’ activity patterns in their homes through surveillance devices purchased from a private company, Mînut Inc. In the fall of 2024, CHRA began installing Mînut Monitor devices inside people’s apartments across the properties it manages, providing government employees with real-time, remote access to granular data about activity within tenants’ homes. These devices are capable of collecting data such as the decibel level of detected noise, motion detector readings showing physical movement of residents and guests, smoke and humidity levels, and scans for iOS signals, which can estimate how many people are nearby. Taken together, the information provided by Mînut Monitors can create a mosaic of detail about peoples’ lives, revealing when they wake up, when they come and go from their home, and more. Mînut Monitors near tenants’ beds can even potentially track sound and motion data that could reflect intimate acts. Much of the data is logged on a minute-by-minute basis. For example, each Mînut Monitor logs sound-level readings approximately every single minute, up to 1,440 times a day. For one tenant, the Mînut Monitor logged more than 140,000 motion events within a seven-month period for just a single unit – an average of more than 700 motion events per day. All told, CHRA has amassed hundreds of millions of data points from within tenants’ apartments. The data is stored indefinitely and available to CHRA employees on demand. The class action lawsuit was filed by New Hampshire Legal Assistance, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire, and the American Civil Liberties Union. As the complaint explains, this invasion of privacy in individuals’ homes by a government agency is unacceptable and violates two provisions of the New Hampshire Constitution, Article 19 and Article 2-b. Article 19 prohibits unreasonable searches by the government. Article 2-b, which was added to the New Hampshire Constitution by referendum in 2018, provides that “an individual’s right to live free from governmental intrusion in private or personal information is natural, essential, and inherent.” Furthermore, CHRA’s implementation of Mînut Monitors over the past two years has been marked by severe lack of transparency and a dismissal of tenants’ objections. Throughout the installation process, significant information was left out of notices to tenants, painting the technology as much less invasive and far-reaching than the Mînut Monitors’ actual capabilities.  

On August 25, 2026, the ACLU of New Hampshire filed a lawsuit against the New Hampshire State Police for not complying with New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know Law when the State Police failed to timely respond to the ACLU of New Hampshire’s request for records concerning the State Police’s Section 287(g) agreement, which allows certified state troopers to act as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) agents. Since late April 2025, the State Police has been a party to an agreement with ICE under the Section 287(g) program. The State Police is one of 28 New Hampshire police agencies participating in this program. Through this program, the State Police has agreed to enforce federal immigration law when troopers trained under the program initiate motor vehicle stops. However, even while some other local New Hampshire police departments participating in this Section 287(g) program have timely produced records under the Right-to-Know Law concerning the nature of their enforcement of federal immigration law, the State Police has failed to do so. As a result, the full nature and scale of the State Police’s implementation of this program and how it enforces federal immigration law—including how many people the State Police has detained under the program and what factors a trooper may consider in assessing whether there is reasonable suspicion or probable cause to believe that there has been a violation of federal immigration laws—remains a mystery to the public. Nor does the public know whether the State Police has received any financial compensation or stipends from ICE under the Section 287(g) program. As this lawsuit argues, if the State Police can devote time to enforcing federal immigration law, then it can devote time to timely informing the public about the nature of this enforcement.

On July 22, 2026, numerous legal organizations across the ideological spectrum — including the ACLU of New Hampshire — filed an amicus brief urging the First Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold a district court’s order blocking the Trump administration’s attempted hostile ideological takeover of Harvard University. The federal government decided to withhold billions of dollars in research funding from Harvard University after the university refused to vet its students, faculty, and course offerings for “ideological diversity” and place certain departments and centers at odds with the government’s preferred viewpoint – such as the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures – under a third party audit. On June 9, 2025, the ACLU and numerous other organizations filed an amicus brief in support of Harvard’s motion for summary judgement. On September 3, 2025, the federal court in the District of Massachusetts blocked the government’s attacks on Harvard. The judge noted that the Trump administration tried to “force Harvard to better manifest the government’s favored worldview,” in direct violation of the university’s right to free speech. Today, the following organizations, together filed an amicus brief asking the appellate court to affirm the lower court’s ruling that the administration’s actions are unconstitutional: ACLU ACLU of Massachusetts ACLU of Maine ACLU of New Hampshire ACLU of Puerto Rico ACLU of Rhode Island Cato Institute Electronic Frontier Foundation Knight First Amendment Institute National Coalition Against Censorship Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Rutherford Institute The brief’s key arguments: “The administration’s conduct is unconstitutional any way you slice it: It represents an effort by this administration to impose ‘its own conception of speech nirvana’ on a private institution . . . ; it improperly seeks to leverage federal research funds in a viewpoint-based way, to control speech outside of the scope of the program, and to control the work of a private university—each of which is unconstitutional in its own right.” The government sought to unconstitutionally coerce Harvard to hire faculty, admit students, and make research choices that aligned with the government’s preferred ideological tilt, a viewpoint-based condition for funding that is unconstitutional.   “The First Amendment principle of academic freedom prohibits the government from imposing ideological admissions, hiring, and programmatic requirements on colleges and universities.” The First Amendment retaliation and coercion in this case is all the more egregious because it targets an institution of higher education, whose choices about who to teach, what to teach, and who should do the teaching are all protected by the First Amendment.

On February 25, 2026, we filed an amicus brief urging the federal First Circuit appeals court to apply the correct test to determine if a public employee’s comments are protected by the First Amendment. The brief does not take a position on the ultimate outcome of whether the speech was protected, but seeks to ensure the proper test is applied to determine the ultimate outcome. This case raises important questions about how the First Amendment rights of public employees are evaluated. Our brief requests that the en banc First Circuit appeals court hold that “mocking, derogatory, or disparaging” messages do not receive less First Amendment weight than other free speech on matters of public concern. The friend-of-the-court brief was filed in Hussey v. City of Cambridge by the ACLU of Massachusetts, ACLU of Maine, ACLU of New Hampshire, ACLU of Rhode Island, ACLU of Puerto Rico, and the national ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. In the brief, we’re asking the appeals court to have the trial court reexamine the case by applying the correct standard. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the controversial or offensive character of speech on public issues is irrelevant to the weight of its First Amendment value. In cases like this one, the only proper place for the court to consider the character of the speech is in its fact-based analysis of whether the speech threatened to disrupt the workplace and undermine the provision of public services. If courts allow government employers to punish employees’ political speech just because it is vulgar or offensive, the First Amendment rights of public employees will depend on subjective codes of etiquette and standards of good taste. That kind of government thumb on the scale of public discourse is anathema to the principles of free speech we all depend on, and that is exactly why we are asking that the court apply the proper standard to this case.

In a “friend of the court” brief filed on February 13, 2026, we’re challenging the federal government’s attempt to access New Hampshire’s unredacted voter file—including information like voters’ driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. The brief was filed on behalf of the ACLU of New Hampshire and the League of Women Voter of New Hampshire. These groups are represented by lawyers from the Campaign Legal Center, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, the national ACLU, and the ACLU of New Hampshire. In early September 2025, New Hampshire’s Secretary of State denied a request by the Trump administration to turn over sensitive voter information. This denial followed an exchange between the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s Office and the Trump administration beginning on June 25, 2025, when Trump administration officials sent requests for voter files to at least nine states (including New Hampshire), many of them considered swing states in upcoming elections. On September 25, 2025, the U.S. DOJ filed a lawsuit in federal court attempting to force the New Hampshire Secretary of State to share the unredacted voter file. This friend-of-the court brief supports the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s motion to dismiss the case. The brief explains that the Trump administration’s lawsuit is part of a nationwide campaign to sweep up voter rolls, one of many tactics in the administration’s broader strategy to undermine free and fair elections. Indeed, as explained in this amicus brief, unredacted voter information includes sensitive details about New Hampshire voters, including birthdates, driver’s license numbers, and social security numbers. Indeed, federal voting rights laws were designed to create free, fair, and secure elections, including the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA). These federal laws were designed to expand and protect voting rights for all—including vulnerable communities that were once denied the right to vote and remain targets for voter suppression efforts—and ensure public confidence in our elections. On June 29, 2026, the Court dismissed the federal government’s lawsuit.  

On January 15, 2026, the ACLU of New Hampshire filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for failing to respond to its official request for documents that have been used, or will be used, to train the approximately 138 law enforcement officers in 13 New Hampshire law enforcement agencies participating in 287(g) agreements. The lawsuit argues that the public has a right to know how 13 New Hampshire law enforcement agencies—including New Hampshire’s largest police force, the State Police—will enforce a federal immigration program that was previously suspended in 2012 following racial profiling concerns. Especially after the recent killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, it is critical to learn how law enforcement officers who are engaging in immigration enforcement are trained. The 287(g) Program is a set of partnerships between ICE and state and local agencies that effectively turns local officials into ICE agents, authorizing selected officers to identify, arrest, and process certain people for immigration enforcement and ultimately deportation. New Hampshire is the only state in New England where local police have entered formal agreements to engage in immigration enforcement. The Troy Police Department, the Colebrook Police Department, the Carroll Police Department, and the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office have already engaged in immigration arrests under this program.