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.

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.

The Supreme Court has long recognized that public school students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” The District of Columbia recognized the same when it promulgated the D.C. Student Bill of Rights, which provides that “[e]ach student shall have the right to exercise his or her constitutional rights of free speech, assembly, and expression without prior restraint, so long as the exercise of these rights does not substantially interfere with the rights of others.” Yet Jackson-Reed High School refuses to allow the exercise of these rights by its Arab Student Union. The Arab Student Union is a recognized student club at Jackson-Reed High School, a public high school in the District of Columbia that is one of the most diverse high schools in the country. For the past four months, the club and its members have been trying to engage in expressive activities at the school—showing a documentary film, putting up posters, distributing literature, presenting a cultural program—but have been stopped at every turn by the school administration. Specifically, the school has denied the club permission to hold voluntary lunchtime meetings to screen a film critical of the Israeli government, and the school has refused even to consider alternative films proposed by the club. The school has censored handouts the club sought to distribute and prohibited them from distributing certain materials entirely. And the school has prevented them from holding a cultural event and then heavily curtailed what they could say at such an event. The Arab Student Union’s activities would not be disruptive; they are the same kinds of activities in which other student clubs engage. Their speech has been suppressed because the school does not want their viewpoint—which concerns the ongoing war in Gaza and its effects on the Palestinian people—to be heard. Representing the club, we sued D.C. and the principal of the school for violating the Arab Student Union’s (and its members’) First Amendment rights and their rights under the federal Equal Access Act and the D.C. Student Bill of Rights. We seek a court order that the students be allowed to show their film before the end of the school year and more generally to be permitted to express their views with their fellow students like any other student club at the school. A hearing on our motion for a preliminary injunction was scheduled for May 10, 2024. But on May 7, with the court’s strong encouragement, we began conversations with the defendants to see if we could reach an agreement about what the Arab Student Union could do during the remaining weeks of the spring semester. We eventually reached an agreement that allows the club to show one of the movies it had requested and to distribute its printed material, including one of the pages that had been censored. Principal Brown also agreed to send an email to all faculty and administrators reiterating that the standards for expressive activities apply equally to all student groups. The lawsuit will continue, so that we can clearly establish the right of the ASU and all student groups to exercise their First Amendment rights in D.C. Public Schools.