Yesterday another federal court said what we’ve been arguing all along: Federal law protects transgender people. 

For the past four years, Gavin Grimm has been seeking justice. For most of his time at Gloucester High School, the district’s school board prohibited him from using the boys’ restroom and forced him to use single-stall facilities that no other student was required to use. They singled him out to be stigmatized and segregated in this way just because he is transgender. 

With the ACLU’s help, Gavin sued his school district for violating his rights under the constitution and Title IX, a civil rights law protecting students from sex discrimination. Gavin’s case made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 2017. But then in February 2017, just one month after Donald Trump took office, the departments of Education and Justice withdrew the Obama-era guidance. 

More so, the Solicitor General sent a letter to the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping to undermine the decisions made by the Fourth Circuit. And it worked. A couple months away from graduation, the U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back down, asking the lower courts to consider the case without the guidance from the Obama administration. 

Over a year later, a federal court has finally vindicated what Gavin has been saying all along.  The court held that, even though Secretary of Education Betsy Devos and Attorney General Jeff Sessions revoked guidance protecting trans students, they could not change what the law means. The court, citing a long line of court decisions supporting transgender people, held that Title IX protects Gavin and other transgender students from discrimination. Forcing Gavin to use separate restrooms violated his rights under both Title IX and the Constitution and hopefully soon three other courts will be doing the same. 

This is an incredible victory for not just Gavin — one that only adds to the forward momentum we’ve been creating in the courts to recognize that transgender people are already protected under federal law. The court has allowed Gavin’s case to move forward by denying the school’s attempts to dismiss the case. But the decision did more than that. The court challenged the idea that policies based on “biological sex” can be implemented. As U.S. District Judge Arenda L. Wright put it, “attempting to draw lines based on physiological and anatomical characteristics proves unmanageable.” 

Gavin’s victory won’t be able to give him back all the years he spent in Gloucester High School, but Gavin is determined to see his case through to the end so that other students never have to go through the same experience. The Department of Education may no longer be interested in hearing civil rights complaints from transgender students, but the courts are thanks to people like Gavin Grimm. 

On a December morning, Border Patrol agents confronted a 15-year-old high school student named Jahveel Ocampo at a rest stop in California while she and her friends were on their way to the mountains to see the winter’s first snow. Jahveel was a young child when she came to the United States from Mexico with her parents, and she grew up undocumented in southern California. She was a mother to a 2-year-old child, who was a U.S. citizen.

An agent in a blue jacket asked whether Jahveel was an “illegal.” He handcuffed her and drove her to a Border Patrol station in the border town of Campo. There, he slapped her twice on the buttocks and ordered her into a cell. He and another male agent told her to sign an “order of voluntary departure,” a deportation order. She refused.

Then the threats began. One agent said, in Spanish, according to the complaint she filed later, “Right now, we close the door, we rape you and f*** you. If you cooperate with us, we can deport you to Mexico. Otherwise, we will take you to jail and deport your entire family.” They told her that her child would end up in foster care.

Terrified and alone, Jahveel signed.

If you assumed this abuse happened during the Trump administration, think again. Jahveel was threatened in 2009 by President Obama’s Border Patrol, and her treatment was not an isolated incident. Her case is part of a pattern of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse by Customs and Border Protection officials against child immigrants that existed long before President Trump emboldened the agency by unleashing its officers to enforce his draconian immigration policies.

We have received more than 30,000 pages of internal government documents detailing this abuse between 2009 and 2014 throughout the southern border region. These records, obtained through an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request and subsequent litigation, offer a glimpse into an immigration enforcement system that had been plagued by brutality and lawlessness long before Trump was elected.

Customs and Border Protection — the Border Patrol’s parent agency — is now the largest law enforcement organization in the United States, with more than 60,000 employees and a fiscal year 2018 budget of $16.4 billion. And while the number of people crossing the border without documents has dropped significantly, Trump has said he wants to hire thousands more Border Patrol agents while deploying the National Guard to the border to bolster its forces. Now the federal government has created a policy of separating immigrant children from their parents, which could dramatically increase the number of minors encountering immigration officials by themselves and create potential for expanded abuses.

Our FOIA request yielded documents from four agencies in the Department of Homeland Security. On Wednesday, the ACLU and the International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago School of Law released a report that includes documents from one agency, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, a DHS oversight agency. We will release additional documents from the other three agencies in the coming months.

The records show that the leadership at Customs and Border Protection were well aware of the allegations of unlawful child abuse — including people still now directing the agency — yet there is no indication that any individual official was ever held accountable for abuse.

In one complaint we obtained, a Border Patrol agent grabbed a girl he claimed was running away, handcuffed her to someone else and dragged them together along the ground, causing “two bruises on her neck, scratches to her shoulders and arms, and thorns in her head.” A 16-year-old recounted that a Border Patrol agent threw him down before he used his boot to smash his head into the ground.

Other children allege that agents assaulted them with their feet, fists, flashlights, and Tasers. In one case, an agent ran over a 17-year-old with a patrol vehicle and then got out and punched the child in the head and body. Often, children noted that other agents witnessed the abuse or saw the injuries but refused them medical attention. In one case, agents accused a pregnant minor of lying about the pain — which turned out to be labor contractions preceding a stillbirth.

The abuse was also sexual. During an arrest in the desert in Phoenix, Arizona, an agent grabbed a child’s buttocks and only stopped when she screamed and another agent approached. In another incident, a 16-year-old girl reported that a Border Patrol agent forcefully spread her legs and touched her genitals so hard she screamed in pain.

President Trump was endorsed by the Border Patrol union, which had never previously endorsed a presidential candidate. If the abuses were this bad under Obama when the Border Patrol described itself as constrained, imagine how it must be now under Trump, who vowed to unleash the agents to do their jobs.

Jose "Ivan" Noe Nuñez Martinez is a 37-year old gay man who fled his native Mexico in 2001, when he was about 21 years old, because he feared for his life. He'd received violent threats because of his sexual orientation, and a gay friend of his there was murdered.  

In 2010, Ivan traveled back to Mexico to visit his mother, whom he feared was close to dying. After that brief trip, he tried to re-enter the United States. Agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended him at the border and removed him pursuant to an expedited removal order. Nevertheless, Ivan's persistent fear for his life in Mexico soon caused him to try again to re-enter the United States, which he did.  

For nearly 17 years, Ivan has lived a peaceful and productive life in this country. He has paid income taxes and has worked unflinchingly hard. Above all, he has cherished his ability to live his life here in relative safety as an openly gay man. In 2014, Ivan met Paul Frame, the love of his life. They married in 2016 in a ceremony before their loved ones and friends. They count their wedding day as among the happiest of their lives.   

To ensure their continued life together in the United States, Paul, a U.S. citizen, began the process of trying to sponsor Ivan to become a permanent resident. On Jan. 31, 2018, he and Ivan attended what they thought would be a routine marriage interview at an office of U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services in Philadelphia. It was anything but routine. Agents of Immigration & Customs Enforcement entered the office mid-interview and arrested Ivan, shocking and horrifying both him and Paul.   

Since Jan. 31, Ivan has been locked up by ICE at a prison facility in York, Pennsylvania. He has been given no opportunity to explain to an immigration judge why his confinement is unnecessary. Ivan doesn't understand why ICE is imprisoning him. Neither does Paul or anyone else who knows Ivan. 

Initially, ICE claimed it had authority to detain Ivan because of his old removal order. However, because Ivan expressed a reasonable and credible fear of persecution in Mexico due to his sexual orientation, his case was referred to an immigration court to decide if he deserves protection against removal to Mexico. Those immigration court proceedings are continuing and could take many months or even years to complete.   

In the meantime, detention is taking a heavy toll. Ivan has been losing weight, losing sleep, at times fearing for his safety in ICE custody. Paul has been suffering, too. He worries constantly about Ivan's physical safety, health, and mental well-being in detention. 

ICE has not explained why Ivan needs to be detained pending his immigration court proceedings. The ACLU of Pennsylvania, together with the law firm of DLA Piper, LLP, has filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on Ivan's behalf, asking a federal district court either to order Ivan's release or order that he be given a bond hearing where he can demonstrate why his detention is unnecessary. 

The United States should be a refuge for people who are fleeing persecution. We want the court to uphold that promise.