Category: Wires

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch surprised many in 2020 when he wrote one of the Supreme Court’s most consequential rulings expanding legal rights for gay and transgender people.

The 6-3 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County held that the ban on sex discrimination in a core federal civil rights law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, covers discrimination against gay and transgender people.

“That’s because it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” Gorsuch wrote.

Conservatives were aghast. Some said the ruling heralded the “end of the conservative legal movement.” Liberals praised Gorsuch’s opinion. Some even speculated that Gorsuch, appointed by President Donald Trump, would take on the role of former Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — the Reagan-nominated justice who was critical in landmark gay rights rulings, including establishing the right to same-sex marriage.

With the Supreme Court set to weigh the question of transgender athletes this week, Gorsuch is again in the spotlight. Supporters of allowing transgender women and girls to play on women’s sports teams have a difficult task persuading the conservative-majority court. They see winning over Gorsuch as key and appear to have crafted their arguments with him in mind.

Lawyers involved in the two cases before the court expect that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who joined Gorsuch’s opinion in Bostock, might side with him again. Together with the court’s three liberals, that would be enough for a narrow majority.

“It’s difficult to imagine how Gorsuch and Roberts would come out differently on this particular issue,” said Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice at the National Women’s Law Center, which filed an amicus brief supporting the trans athletes at the center of the cases.

Gorsuch and Roberts, however, have more recently handed defeats to advocates for gay and transgender rights. In June, Roberts wrote the 6-3 ruling that upheld state bans on gender transition care for minors. Gorsuch and Roberts also joined a 6-3 majority that sided with Maryland parents who wanted to opt their children out of lessons featuring LGBTQ+-themed books.

Because of that, as well as polling that suggests views on trans issues have become more conservative in recent years, some see Bostock as an outlier.

“Gorsuch is truly a man on his own,” said Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law at Houston, referring to the justice’s reputation for sometimes taking unconventional positions. “On the other hand, he’s living in 2025, and it’s not 2020.”

The court will hear arguments in the two transgender cases on Tuesday. One concerns Lindsay Hecox, a trans woman and Boise State University student, who challenged a 2020 Idaho law that bars trans women from playing on female sports teams. She says the law violated the Constitution’s equal-protection clause when it stopped her from joining the university’s cross-country team.

The second case concerns 15-year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson, a transgender high school athlete from West Virginia. Unlike Hecox, Pepper-Jackson argues the law in her state barring trans athletes from women’s sports violates Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools. That law is worded similarly to the one Gorsuch ruled on in Bostock.

In their court filing in Pepper-Jackson’s case, the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal quoted Gorsuch far more than any other justice. They directly quoted his Bostock opinion more than a dozen times and also cited other opinions of his, including a 2012 case dating from Gorsuch’s time as a judge on the court of appeals.

Karen Loewy, interim deputy legal director for litigation at Lambda Legal, a prominent advocacy group for gay rights, said the approach was not about Gorsuch in particular. Citing his Bostock opinion was necessary for Pepper-Jackson’s arguments about discrimination against transgender people being sex-based discrimination.

“It really is not a Gorsuch-specific thing,” Loewy said. “He happens to have the gems that really underscore our arguments.”

Other observers say the strategy is clear.

“Of course” Pepper-Jackson’s lawyers are working to persuade Gorsuch, said Steve Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center who regularly writes about the Supreme Court. “The harder question is whether that’s actually going to work.”

Gorsuch’s rulings since Bostock raise doubts.

His votes in the Tennessee case on gender-transition treatments and the Maryland schoolbook case indicate that it’s “unlikely Gorsuch views the trans athletes cases the way he sees Bostock,” said Blackman, who was among the conservatives who criticized Gorsuch following the Bostock ruling.

Americans have become more supportive of restrictions for transgender people in the past few years, according to a Pew Research Center survey published in February. Fifty-six percent of Americans supported bans on providing gender transition care for minors, up 10 percentage points from 2022, the study found. And 66% favored or strongly favored laws that require trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth, up eight points from 2022.

Even before the shift in public opinion, a majority of Americans opposed allowing transgender female athletes to compete against other women at all levels of sports, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.

“The climate of views of trans rights is different today than it was five years ago,” Blackman said.

Title VII, which was at the center of the Bostock case, made it illegal for employers to discriminate against workers based on race, national origin, religion or sex.

“[F]ew pieces of federal legislation rank in significance,” Gorsuch wrote in his 2020 opinion. He wrote that it was “clear” that discriminating against gay and transgender workers meant discriminating on the basis of sex.

Lawyers for Pepper-Jackson say the same logic should apply to their case.

“Like an employer who fires employees for being transgender, a school administrator who discriminates against students for being transgender ‘must intentionally discriminate against individual [students] in part because of sex,’” Pepper-Jackson’s lawyers wrote, quoting Gorsuch’s opinion.

But lawyers for the state of West Virginia say sports is different from the workplace — an argument that allows them to court Gorsuch’s support without asking him to disavow his Bostock ruling.

Sex should be irrelevant at work, but “sex is relevant in sports, often requiring sex-differentiated opportunities to ensure fairness and safety,” West Virginia’s lawyers wrote in their brief to the justices. Transgender women have inherent advantages in women’s sports, they argue, and should be banned to ensure equal opportunity for women.

John Bursch, senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization, said he’s confident Gorsuch and Roberts will be part of a majority upholding the bans in Idaho and West Virginia.

Alliance Defending Freedom represents Madison Kenyon and Mary Kate Marshall, Idaho State University track and cross-country athletes, who are asking the Supreme Court to uphold the Idaho ban alongside the state’s governor, Brad Little.

Bursch agreed with West Virginia’s argument. In the context of student sports, he said, “you have to take sex into consideration.”

The National Portrait Gallery removed a swath of text that mentioned President Donald Trump’s two impeachments and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection as it swapped out a prominent photo of him last week.

Trump and the White House posted on social media Friday and Saturday to highlight the updated portrait in the “America’s Presidents” exhibition, which now features a framed black-and-white photo by White House photographer Daniel Torok. It shows Trump staring intensely, with his fists on the Resolute Desk — an image the president first shared on his Truth Social account last year.

It replaced a photo by Washington Post photojournalist Matt McClain, which showed Trump with his hands folded in front of him, and was accompanied by a longer caption recounting Trump’s first term and his reelection. “Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials,” it read, in part.

A Trump official specifically complained about that passage months earlier, when the president was trying to force out the portrait gallery’s director.

The placard has been replaced with one whose caption is so short that the outline of the old sign was visible on the wall beneath it, simply noting Trump’s years in office. It now contrasts with portraits of other former presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, which all hang alongside wall text highlighting events during their time in office. Clinton’s notes his impeachment.

National Portrait Gallery spokesperson Concetta Duncan said the museum is “exploring” less descriptive “tombstone labels” for some new exhibits and displays, and she noted that Trump’s portrait in the popular exhibition has changed before.

Neither the Smithsonian nor the White House directly responded when asked if the Trump administration had requested the changes. The revamp comes several months after Trump bashed former portrait gallery director Kim Sajet as “highly partisan,” leading to her resignation, and after the White House threatened to withhold Smithsonian funding if the institution doesn’t cooperate with the administration’s review of museum content for “improper ideology.”

Trump’s allies in government have recently led efforts to brand the public sphere with his preferred personal descriptors in ways large and small, adding his name to the Kennedy Center and U.S. Institute of Peace and installing plaques in the White House that laud Trump and disparage his political rivals such as former presidents Biden and Obama. Last year, the Colorado Capitol replaced a portrait of Trump after he complained about it.

Besides noting the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters and his impeachments in the House, the old placard mentioned his Supreme Court appointments, his 2020 election loss to Biden, and his efforts to lead the development of coronavirus vaccines. The text also said that the former photo portrait by McClain was supposed to remain on view until Trump’s commissioned painting was unveiled. (The previous portrait and its biographical label still appeared on the Smithsonian website as of Saturday afternoon.)

The National Portrait Gallery portrayed the changes as unremarkable, saying that it previously rotated two photos of Trump through the collection.

A notice posted on the gallery’s website announced the exhibition would temporarily close for updates from April 6 to May 14. It did not specify whether the other labels for former presidents would be changed during that period.

A former Smithsonian historian, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the institution, said that the National Portrait Gallery’s relatively long wall texts have stood out in comparison to shorter labels at many other art museums. “Because it’s a museum which combines art and portraiture, it has always had a biographical component to its labels to explain and contextualize the individual who’s being portrayed,” they said, adding that “you can outline the parameters of somebody’s career in a very neutral fashion.”

“Tombstone” labels — museum jargon for bare-bones signs that list only essential information such as the artist, date of creation, and medium — are common at art museums such as the Guggenheim or MoMA, as well as other Smithsonian art museums.

This isn’t the first time the Smithsonian has removed material mentioning congressional attempts to remove Trump from office since he launched a public campaign to remove what he calls “woke” ideology from U.S. cultural institutions. In July, the National Museum of American History briefly removed — then restored — references to his impeachments in its exhibition “The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden.”

The institution said it had taken the text out “because the other topics in this section had not been updated since 2008.” The change was part of a content review that the Smithsonian agreed to undertake, following pressure from the White House to remove Sajet as the portrait gallery’s director.

At the time, a White House official provided the Washington Post with a list of instances in which Sajet allegedly criticized Trump or promoted improper ideology. It specifically included the caption on his presidential portrait, for mentioning his impeachments and the Capitol attack.

Although the Smithsonian Board of Regents affirmed that only its secretary could decide the institution’s personnel, Sajet later stepped down and has not been permanently replaced. Elliot Gruber serves as acting director.

The changes ignited concerns about political interference at the Smithsonian and how the institution charged with preserving American history could be shaped by the Trump administration’s efforts to exert more control over its work.

Torok became the White House photographer during Trump’s second term. One of his first official portraits drew attention for its similarity to the president’s 2023 mug shot, for his indictment on criminal charges in Atlanta.

His photo now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery shows the president leaning over his desk in the Oval Office, fists clenched, looking directly into the camera. Trump posted the photo on Truth Social in October, writing that he was “getting ready to leave our imprint on the World.”

Torok celebrated the Smithsonian display on social media on Friday and previously described the photo on Instagram as “Powerful!”

The photo strikingly echoes a quieter image of John F. Kennedy. The president was captured from behind, hunched over in nearly the same position as Trump, in a 1961 photograph called “The Loneliest Job.”

Trump has struck the same pose in other photos, including one Stephen Voss shot for Time in October.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said hundreds more federal agents will be deployed to Minnesota as federal and local officials on Sunday doubled down on their competing accounts of what led up to the killing of a U.S. citizen by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis last week, and who gets to investigate.

In an interview with Fox NewsBusiness’s Sunday Morning Futures, Noem said the administration will send more officers on Sunday and Monday.

“There’ll be hundreds more, in order to allow our ICE and our Border Patrol individuals that are working in Minneapolis to do so safely,” Noem said.

The increase in federal agent presence in Minnesota comes as protests continued throughout the weekend. Demonstrators gathered across the country Saturday to demonstrate against ICE and the killing of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three.

Trump officials remained adamant Sunday that Good was responsible for her own death, while Democrats insisted that an investigation including local law enforcement must be completed before drawing conclusions.

Federal agents in Minneapolis rammed the door of one home Sunday and pushed their way inside, part of what DHS has called its largest enforcement operation ever.

In a dramatic scene similar to those playing out across Minneapolis, agents captured a man in the home just minutes after pepper spraying protesters outside who had confronted the heavily-armed federal agents. Along the residential street, protesters honked car horns, banged on drums, and blew whistles in attempts to disrupt the operation.

But within minutes, the handcuffed man was led away and soon gone.

More than 2,000 immigration arrests have been made in Minnesota since the enforcement operation began at the beginning of December, said Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

Tensions over the facts of the fatal shooting of Good grew as the FBI, which has taken over the investigation, continued to block Minnesota officials from participating in the inquiry, forcing the local authorities to conduct their own review.

Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union, Noem said that Good was to blame for the shooting, even though an official investigation into the shooting has not been completed, and as video evidence raised several questions about the administration’s assessment of what happened. About two hours after the shooting on Wednesday, Noem released a statement asserting that Good committed an act of “domestic terrorism,” and she accused Good of weaponizing her SUV by attempting to “run a law enforcement officer over.”

Almost immediately after the shooting, federal officials, including President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Noem, said the ICE officer fired in self-defense. Details of the killing, which was captured in videos widely disseminated online, dispute the administration’s view of the incident. Federal officials’ quick decision to blame Good for the shooting has drawn deep condemnation from Democrats nationwide and Minnesota leaders who’ve argued that federal authorities have not yet finalized a full review of the incident, and that they are blocking Minnesota officials from participating in the investigation.

Across interviews on Sunday, Noem repeated her accusations that Good used her Honda Pilot to attack the officer, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that “everything that I said has been proven to be factual.” When pressed by Tapper about video evidence showing that the ICE agent was able to move out of the vehicle’s way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the car as it veered past him, Noem said Good was “breaking the law by impeding and obstructing a law enforcement operation.” Noem also mentioned that there is video — which Tapper said he had not yet seen — that shows “that this officer was hit by her vehicle.”

“These officers were doing their due diligence that their training had prepared them to do,” Noem said, insisting that she’s correct in labeling Good a “domestic terrorist” because she “weaponized her vehicle to conduct an act of violence against a law enforcement officer and the public.”

When Tapper once again pressed her on her decision to draw conclusions ahead of a full investigation, Noem said the administration “will continue to look at this individual and what her motivations were,” but claimed that Good had “harassed and impeded law enforcement operations.”

Good’s wife has said that Good had “stopped to support our neighbors” when she was fatally shot on the residential street. Good’s family members have said they do not believe she was tailing ICE officers. She had just dropped her son off at school before the shooting, they said. Her father, Tim Ganger, said in a brief interview Wednesday that she got “caught up in a bad situation.”

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News Sunday that he believes the officer thought his life was in danger and acted in response. Homan, however, urged Americans to wait for an investigation to play out before making more accusations.

“There’s a lot of things we don’t know,” Homan said. “You can’t compare this to murder. Murder requires malice and that is just dangerous to put that type of language out.”

Homan then accused Democratic leaders — including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who used an expletive when saying ICE should leave the city — of spreading “the hateful rhetoric [that] has caused a lot of this violence.”

Frey told NBC News’s Meet the Press that he does bear responsibility to “bring down the temperature” of the rhetoric.

“To those that are offended, I’m sorry I offended their delicate ears,” Frey said. “But as far as who inflamed the situation, you know, I dropped an f-bomb. And they killed somebody. I think the killing somebody is the inflammatory element here, not the f-bomb.”

Frey also told NBC News that he believes there is now “deep mistrust” over what the results of an FBI investigation into the shooting will be given that federal officials are not allowing Minnesota authorities, including the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, to contribute to the review.

“What I was pushing back on from the very beginning was a narrative that had jumped to that conclusion right from the get-go,” he said. “When you’ve got a federal administration that is so quick to jump on a narrative as opposed to the truth, I think we all need to be speaking out.”

Sen. Tina Smith (D., Minn.) was more aggressive in her rebuke, accusing the Trump administration of running a “cover-up” of Good’s shooting by trying to shift the public narrative before facts could be learned by investigators.

“Hours after Renee Good was shot and killed by federal agents, [DHS Secretary] Kristi Noem was telling us what had happened,” Smith said in an interview with ABC’s This Week. “How can we trust the federal government to do an objective, unbiased investigation without prejudice when at the beginning of that investigation, they have already announced exactly what they think happened?”

Information from the Associated Press was used in this article.

The Department of Homeland Security has changed its account of an immigration enforcement-related shooting in Maryland that left two men injured on Christmas Eve, a move prompted by a local police account that contradicted the federal agency’s initial statement.

In the department’s announcement of the shooting on X, officials said officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were executing a “targeted immigration enforcement operation” in Glen Burnie when they approached a vehicle and told the driver, Tiago Alexandre Sousa-Martins, to turn off the engine. In the passenger seat of Sousa-Martins’ van, the department said, was Solomon Antonio Serrano-Esquivel.

Officers “defensively fired” their guns at the vehicle, striking Sousa-Martins after he allegedly refused to power off his van and attempted to flee, ramming it into “several ICE vehicles” before driving in the officers’ direction, DHS said in its initial account. In that account, Serrano-Esquivel suffered whiplash when Sousa-Martins’ van crashed between two buildings.

But the Anne Arundel County Police Department issued a statement Friday that offered a counter narrative. One of the men was an ICE detainee and already in the agency’s custody when the incident occurred, police said. The other was injured by gunfire “while operating a separate vehicle.”

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday about the discrepancy in accounts and the status of the two men’s injuries. In a statement provided to the Baltimore Sun, Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin confirmed Serrano-Esquivel was inside “one of the ICE vehicles that was rammed.”

In its initial account of the shooting, DHS said Sousa-Martins, a Portuguese national, had been living in the United States illegally on an expired visa that lapsed in 2009, according to a statement provided to the Washington Post in December. The statement also noted Serrano-Esquivel, who’s from El Salvador, was also in the country illegally.

Sousa-Martins is being held at a detention facility in Bowling Green, Va., according to ICE’s detainee locator website. No details were available for Serrano-Esquivel’s whereabouts and DHS did not immediately respond to questions about either man’s detention status.

The December incident is one of over a dozen ICE shootings during President Donald Trump’s second term, according to media reports and court records.

On Wednesday, Renée Good, 37, was fatally shot on a residential street in Minneapolis during an exchange with an ICE officer, sparking protests and scrutiny over ICE’s tactics. The following day, two people were shot and injured during a “targeted vehicle stop” in Portland, Ore., prompting an investigation from Oregon officials.

DHS has said ICE officers are facing a surge in threats and assaults, including with vehicles used as weapons, and blamed “sanctuary politicians and the media.” Officials have vowed to prosecute “rioters” and warned that demonstrations will not stop their immigration enforcement efforts.

Anne Arundel County police said in their statement on Friday that the Glen Burnie shooting is still under investigation, and that its officers do not enforce immigration law, work with ICE, or ask people about immigration status. At a December news conference, department spokesperson Justin Mulcahy said the FBI will investigate the alleged attempt to run over the federal agents and ICE would conduct an internal investigation through its Office of Professional Responsibility.