US judge blocks Trump from sending transgender women to men’s prisons

By Mike Scarcella, Nate Raymond and Luc Cohen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. judge on Tuesday blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from moving transgender women to men’s prisons and ending their gender-affirming care.

In a broad ruling temporarily halting an executive order that Trump, a Republican, signed on his first day back in office on Jan. 20, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington found that three transgender inmates who sued would likely succeed in arguing the policy was unconstitutional.

The decision marked the second time that a federal judge had sided with LGBTQ legal rights groups who sued to prevent the U.S. Bureau of Prisons from implementing the order.

Lamberth’s order applies to all 16 transgender women currently housed in federal women’s prisons. It goes further than a Jan. 26 decision by a federal judge in Boston blocking prison officials from transferring an individual transgender woman to a men’s facility.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department, which defended the Trump administration in court, declined to comment. The Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The three transgender women who brought the Washington, D.C. case argued transgender women would face violence and sexual assault in men’s prisons, which would violate their right to not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment as guaranteed by the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

U.S. Justice Department attorney John Robinson had argued that the Bureau of Prisons has broad authority to make inmate placement decisions. He urged Lamberth, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, to wait for the agency to revise its policies before issuing any order compelling the continuation of medical treatment.

In his decision, Lamberth wrote that the government did not dispute the plaintiffs’ assertion that transgender persons were at a higher risk of physical and sexual violence than other inmates when housed in a facility corresponding to their biological sex.

Trump’s executive order directed the federal government to only recognize two, biologically distinct sexes, male and female; house transgender women in men’s prisons; and cease funding for any gender-affirming medical care for inmates.

Prior to Trump’s order, the Bureau of Prisons had been operating under guidelines adopted in 2022 during Democratic former President Joe Biden’s tenure requiring prisons to consider inmates’ “current gender expression” when deciding where to house them.

Biden’s policy was a reversal from earlier guidance during Trump’s first term.

The lawsuit filed on Jan. 30 also argued that Trump’s executive order discriminates against transgender people on the basis of sex in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

About 2,230 transgender inmates are housed in federal custodial facilities and halfway houses, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. About two thirds of them, 1,506, are transgender women, most of whom are housed in men’s prisons.

(Reporting by Mike Scarcella in Washington and Nate Raymond in Boston; Additional reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Noeleen Walder and Christopher Cushing)

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