Court Cases

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 District Court issued a preliminary injunction for the individual plaintiff. The District 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 October 30, 2025, the Court granted class certification. On December 19, 2025, the District Court ruled that the Trump administration is unlawfully denying bond hearings to potentially thousands of people in New England who were arrested and detained by ICE and deprived of the opportunity to challenge their ongoing detention. The District Court granted a motion for partial summary judgment and declared that it was unlawful for the government to deny bond hearings to class members. This case was appealed, and we filed our brief at the First Circuit Court of Appeals on March 9, 2026. On August 13, 2026, the First Circuit upheld the District Court ruling declaring that the Trump administration is unlawfully denying bond hearings to thousands of people arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New England.

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 May 20, 2026, Plaintiffs filed their motion for summary judgment seeking final judgment in the case.

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. On September 26, 2025, the Government asked the United States Supreme Court to take the case and bypass the First Circuit. The ACLU filed its response on October 29, 2025. On December 5, 2025, the Supreme Court issued an order accepting the case. Our brief was filed at the Supreme Court on February 19, 2026. The case was heard on April 1, 2026. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court held that President Trump’s effort to get rid of birthright citizenship violated the constitution. However, on August 6, 2026, the President signed a new executive order again targeting birthright citizenship. On August 11, 2026, we asked a federal court to make it unquestionably clear that the citizenship of babies covered by that class-action lawsuit is protected despite this new executive order. On August 25, 2026, the Government filed its response, which we responded to on August 28, 2026.