A federal judge temporarily blocked the Federal Bureau of Prisons from carrying out President Trump’s executive order to move incarcerated transgender women into men’s facilities and stop gender transition medical treatments, the Washington Post reports. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington, D.C., said the plaintiffs — three transgender women who said they were set to be moved into men’s facilities — had shown they were likely to succeed on their claims that the order violated the Constitution’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment. The ruling applies nationwide. Lamberth found that the plaintiffs had “straightforwardly demonstrated that irreparable harm will follow” if their request for a restraining order were denied. Lawyers for the women said they were “extremely pleased.” “It is a relief to the transgender women we represent that they will not be moved and that their medical care must continue,” said Jennifer Levi of GLAD Law, one of two nonprofit legal groups representing the plaintiffs. “And it’s so important that judges are preserving constitutional values in the face of the Trump administration’s naked power grabs — coming at the cost of the lives of vulnerable people.”
This suit is one of several legal challenges the Trump administration is facing as the president attempts to make sweeping changes through executive actions. Others have filed suits involving transgender young people and military service members. This week, a judge indefinitely blocked Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign visitors. A previous ruling in Massachusetts also temporarily blocked the Bureau of Prisons from transferring another incarcerated transgender woman, who said she had been moved to solitary confinement. Trump's order is one of several the president has signed targeting transgender people, including a wide array of directives that Trump said would restore “biological truth to the federal government.” Trump wrote that his administration should ensure that “males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers.” Shortly after he signed the order, the three women, who filed the suit anonymously, were told they’d soon be moved to male facilities. All three were removed from the general population and placed in segregated housing with other transgender women. Roughly 2,230 transgender people are housed in federal custodial facilities and halfway houses, according to the Justice Department. About two-thirds of them, 1,506, are trans women, but only 16 are housed in women’s prisons.
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