A second federal judge halted the transfer of three transgender inmates into a male prison facility that followed President Donald Trump’s day-one executive order requiring federal accommodation facilities to correspond with biological sex.
Judge Royce Lamberth, appointed to the Washington DC federal bench by former President Ronald Reagan in 1987, issued an expanded preliminary injunction against Trump’s sweeping executive order defining biological sex as the defining feature of federal policy, as opposed to self-determined gender identity.
According to court documents, three plaintiffs filed for an injunction against Trump’s order on Feb. 18, and nine new plaintiffs were added to the case on Feb. 21, with the goal of preventing their transfer to biological male facilities within the Bureau of Prisons, or BOP.
All of the plaintiffs in the case are described as “transgender women incarcerated in women’s BOP facilities.”
Lamberth wrote in his brief three-page opinion that the challenge to Trump’s order would likely succeed on the plaintiff’s Eighth Amendment claim that transferring trans-identified prisoners into a male-only prison constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
“Summarily removing the possibility of housing the plaintiffs in a women’s facility, when that was determined to be the appropriate facility under the existing constitutional and statutory regime, demonstrates a likelihood of success on the merits of the plaintiff’s Eight Amendment claim,” wrote Lamberth.
The judge did not evaluate the plaintiff’s Fourteenth Amendment equal protection claim or their other arguments.
In January, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole issued a temporary restraining order that prevented federal prisons from relocating an inmate in Massachusetts, referred to in court filings as Marie Moe.
The multi-plaintiff lawsuit in D.C. echoes the arguments made by Moe that trans-identified inmates face a high risk of violence, sexual assault, and harassment in male prisons and that losing access to long-standing hormone treatment would cause irreparable harm.
Trump’s controversial day-one executive order, entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” said that single-sex spaces are a necessity for the safety of biological women who have also, in certain circumstances, experienced violence and harassment from trans-identified inmates when housed in the same facility.
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During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump solidified support among swing-state voters by highlighting that his opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, supported using government funds to support hormonal and surgical therapies for transgender inmates in the California prison system while she was Attorney General of the state.
Trump’s ad campaign of “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” aired over 30,000 times in swing states to the tune of $11 million.