“There was a common practice in the mid-1900s, when the U.S. was involved in all of these wars in other places, of trying to deny the citizenship of the children that were born from American military men going abroad,” said Kayla Vinson, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who is representing Bowman. “The laws of the time made those children citizens, and the U.S. military and the U.S. government have a practice of trying to deny the existence of those children and the U.S. citizenship claims of those children.”