In The Courts

Three transgender people currently incarcerated in federal custody have filed a class action lawsuit against the Trump Administration and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) challenging an Executive Order and new BOP policies prohibiting their access to gender-affirming care. The class action lawsuit was filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., on behalf of approximately 2,000 transgender people incarcerated in federal prisons across the United States.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Democracy Forward, and the ACLU of the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration over the president’s unlawful and unprecedented invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. The Alien Enemies Act, passed in 1798, is a wartime authority providing that the president may — after a public proclamation — apprehend, restrain, and remove citizens of a foreign country that is engaged in a “declared war” or “invasion or predatory incursion” against the United States. The lawsuit charges that President Trump's invocation of a centuries-old wartime act unlawfully during peacetime to accelerate mass deportations, sidestepping the limits of this wartime authority and the procedures and protections in immigration law. The Alien Enemies Act’s previous use during wartime — for example, its invocation during World War II to justify the internment of people of Japanese ancestry — has correctly drawn sustained criticism. Employing it as a way to evade domestic laws in peacetime is fundamentally wrong.

Immigrants’ rights advocates sued the Trump administration on Feb. 12, 2025, for access to immigrants transferred from the United States to detention at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba under President Trump’s recent order.