Washington, DC: An Indian American attorney has emerged as a leading voice challenging Trump administration's attempt to restrict birthright citizenship in the US Supreme Court.
Smita Ghosh, Senior Appellate Counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Centre (CAC), has played a key role in challenging Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14160, signed on Jan 20, 2025, which restricts the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, which established birthright citizenship in the US.
Trump's executive order directs federal agencies to deny US citizenship to certain children born in the US after February 19, 2025, if their mother was unlawfully or temporarily present in the country and the father was neither a US citizen nor a lawful permanent resident.
Ghosh's arguments are crucial to the Trump v. Barbara case in the US Supreme Court. She has used an 1844 case to argue that Trump's executive order striking down birthright citizenship was unconstitutional. Ghosh is the lead author of the 'Brief of Scholars of Constitutional Law and Immigration', which cites legal precedence and forms the core of the legal challenge to Trump's executive order.
According to her CAC profile, Ghosh holds a Juris Doctor (JD) from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a PhD in American Legal History from the same institution. Before joining CAC, she served as a research fellow at Georgetown University Law Centre, where she taught immigration and separation-of-powers law. She has also worked as a Supreme Court Fellow at the US Sentencing Commission and clerked for a federal judge.
