Court Cases

We filed this lawsuit alleging that the Alien Enemies Act had no application in this situation and violated the immigration statutes, which are explicit that they provide “the sole and exclusive procedure” by which the government may determine whether to remove an individual.

This case concerns a ban on life-saving medical treatment for incarcerated people with gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria arises when someone experiences clinically significant distress based on an incongruence between their gender identity (that is, their internal sense of gender) and sex designated at birth. Everyone has a gender identity; however, for some people, it does align with their sex assigned at birth. That, in and of itself, is not a health disorder. Gender dysphoria arises when people experience clinically significant distress from the incongruence. If untreated, gender dysphoria can result in severe anxiety and depression, self-harm, and suicidality. The widely approved treatment for gender dysphoria resolves the distress by enabling individuals to live consistently with their gender identity. That can involve social transition (such as using a name, pronoun, and clothing associated with one’s gender identity), hormone treatment to masculinize or feminize the body, and surgeries to change certain sex characteristics. During the first Trump administration, and the Biden administration, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) provided gender affirming care to incarcerated people with gender dysphoria when a doctor concluded doing so was appropriate. On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The order bans BOP from using federal funds for “any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” BOP responded to the order by banning incarcerated transgender people from obtaining accommodations (such as gender-appropriate undergarments) and terminating (or threatening to terminate) their hormone treatments. BOP restored at least some individuals’ hormone treatment, but only after this lawsuit was filed and a court intervened in a related case. Plaintiffs Alishea Kingdom, Solo Nichols, and Jas Kapule—all incarcerated transgender individuals with gender dysphoria—bring this case on behalf of themselves and others similarly situated in order to protect their basic right to crucial medical care and equal treatment under the law.

Federal law guarantees noncitizens fleeing persecution and torture in other nations the opportunity to seek protection in the United States, if they arrive here. It has prohibited the government from removing individuals to places where they face persecution and torture. But President Trump has attempted to wipe away these laws by fiat. On January 20, 2025, within hours of his inauguration, President Trump issued a proclamation, “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion,” that purports to prohibit noncitizens who have arrived in the United States from seeking asylum and instead to summarily expel them to countries where they face persecution and torture. The proclamation principally relies on Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f), which authorizes the President to “suspend the entry” of noncitizens when their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” But this authority to “suspend entry” does not empower the President to expel people who have already entered the United States, much less to do so in violation of the protections and procedures Congress provided elsewhere in the same statute. We filed this lawsuit on February 3, 2025, together with the National ACLU, the ACLU of Texas, the National Immigrant Justice Center, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, and the Texas Civil Rights Project, on behalf of three nonprofit organizations that provide legal services to refugees seeking asylum. The case asks the court to prohibit the government from implementing this Trump proclamation.

In 2018, President Trump signed into law the bipartisan First Step Act, which was designed to reform extreme criminal sentencing laws, reduce the population in federal prisons, and encourage people in prison to take advantage of educational, training, and rehabilitative programs by earning credits towards time off their sentences. The statute unambiguously provides that the Bureau of Prisons shall move people out of prison—into halfway houses, home confinement, or supervised release—when they meet certain requirements and when their earned credits are equal to their remaining sentences. But instead of following the law, BOP adopted a regulation providing that it may move people out of prison when their earned credits are equal to their remaining sentences. As a result, thousands of people who are legally entitled be back in their communities and with their families remain in prison. On December 20, 2024, we filed this class action lawsuit, together with the National ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, asking the federal court to order the Bureau of Prisons to obey the law. On January 14, 2025, we filed a motion for a preliminary injunction and provisional class certification, asking the court to order the Bureau of Prisons to transfer class members out of prison when their earned time credits were equal to the time remaining on their sentences.

This case, brought by a class of people who are or will be on parole or supervised release in Washington, D.C., challenges the failure of the federal government’s post-conviction supervision system to accommodate individuals with disabilities as required by federal law.