A Reagan-appointed federal judge is demanding that President Donald Trump’s administration continue to provide transgender care to inmates.
The law requires that any decision to curtail medical care must be based on a “reasoned” analysis, which U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth claims was not met by the administration. While Lamberth has previously ordered continued gender-affirming care for several individual inmates, this ruling is a larger block that prevents Trump’s executive order against “gender ideology” from taking effect.
“Neither the [Bureau of Prisons] BOP nor the Executive Order provides any serious explanation as to why the treatment modalities covered by the Executive Order … should be handled differently than any other mental health intervention,” the judge explained in his ruling.
This is not Lamberth’s first anti-Trump ruling.
“Lamberth has also ruled repeatedly against the Trump administration’s efforts to shutter Voice of America and its news affiliates in another high-profile ongoing barrage of litigation. In recent years, Lamberth has used his rulings to decry what he considers a rising tide of threats to the separation of powers, democracy, and, in particular, misinformation by Trump and his allies over the way courts work,” Politico reports.
He also turned the sentencing of a January 6 defendant awaiting a pardon from Trump into a lecture on the lasting effects of the Capitol riot.
In 2024, Philip Grillo was sentenced to 12 months in prison by Lamberth, who commented on the danger of letting the events of January 6 fade into history. He stressed that “truth and justice, law and order” are fundamental American principles, and pointed out how jurors who have heard cases related to the riot “know how perilously close we came to letting the peaceful transfer of power, that great cornerstone of the American republican experiment and perhaps our foremost contribution to posterity, slip away from us.”
Grillo had been charged with a felony count of obstruction of an official proceeding, but following SCOTUS’s ruling that the charge could not be brought in J6 cases, he was convicted of the remaining misdemeanors he faced.
“We f**king did it, you understand? We stormed the Capitol,” he reportedly said in a video taken inside the building. “We shut it down! We did it!”
Lamberth refused to delay sentencing in the event that Trump may end up pardoning Grillo, as he had done with many J6 defendants.
Prior to the sentencing, the judge said it was his obligation “to facilitate the search for truth, interpret the law, apply it to the facts, and dispense justice as the law demands.”
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Sierra Marlee is a millennial whose hunger for the truth in a world of fake news has led her to write. Marlee also contributes to BizPac Review.
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