Who is Smita Ghosh?

Smita Ghosh is an Indian-origin lawyer who currently works as an appellate counsel and is one of the attorneys who has challenged Trump's executive order, which seeks to undermine constitutional guarantees granted to those born on American soil.

Ghosh is also a legal scholar in her own right, and has extensively written on the history of citizenship in the US, including a recent analysis of how pre-14th Amendment judgements, such as a 1844 New York case, outline the true meaning and intention of birthright citizenship, according to the SCOTUS website.

The Indian-American lawyer argues that the 14th Amendment, which grants constitutional protection to birthright citizenship, was aimed to solidifying existing legal principles rather than narrow them, countering the interpretation suggested by Trump's executive order.

How Smita Ghosh is challenging Trump's order?

Smita Ghosh is among Indian-American lawyers who have challenged Trump's assault on US citizenship laws in the country's highest court, underscoring the growing role of Indian diaspora in the fight against constitutional rights of immigrants

She is among a growing group of lawyers who are using US constitutional history to fight attempts at downgrading fundamental rights of immigrants, including one of its core ideas that declares anyone born in the US a citizen.

While Smita Ghosh is yet a relatively unknown name among US law circles, she is quickly gaining prominence, and emerging as one of the key faces of the opposition to Trump's discriminatory order which seeks to dismantle US immigration laws.

Why Trump attended SCOTUS proceedings?

On Wednesday, Donald Trump attended in person the US Supreme Court hearing challenging his birthright citizenship, underscoring the high stakes of the legal challenge. Ahead of the SCOTUS proceedings, Trump blasted the birthright citizenship law, saying that the US is "the only country… stupid enough" to maintain the practice.

According to a report by The Hill, Trump attended the proceedings to specifically to observe the legal presentation delivered by the administration's counsel, Solicitor General D. John Sauer.

The United States is among 30 nations, primarily located in the Americas, that provide automatic nationality to individuals born on their soil.

The policy, known as jus soli, stands in stark contrast to the legal frameworks of numerous countries throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, which adhere to the jus sanguinis principle, which determines citizenship by the nationality of a person's parents rather than their geographic place of birth.