Women’s non-profit plans to sue Secret Service over harmful DEI quota

Diversity, equity, and inclusion meant discrimination, endangerment, and illegal to a non-profit making the Secret Service a focus of a potential lawsuit after assassination attempts on Trump.

The limited accountability within the agency tasked with protecting VIPs which included former President Donald Trump only featured more prominently after a second attempt was made on his life earlier this month. Now, the stated objective promoted by the since-resigned USSS Director Kimberly Cheatle of sex-based quotas found the Independent Women’s Forum plotting legal action.

Joined by the Mountain States Legal Foundation, the IWF issued a call for plaintiffs who believed they had been harmed by DEI policies of the Secret Service. As May Mailman, director of the IWF’s Independent Women’s Law Center put it, “Arbitrary diversity quotas do not help women earn the credibility we deserve, and they have no place in law enforcement.”

Speaking with Fox News Digital, she discussed the potential suit against the agency and reminded, “In our country, it is illegal for the government to discriminate on the basis of sex. That is the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.”

“But also Title VII prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of sex. And yet you have the Secret Service, of all agencies, saying that they want to have a 30% female quota,” explained Mailman.

In the wake of the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump where the behavior of several female agents raised eyebrows, Cheatle’s call to have 30% of recruits be women by 2030 prompted concerns.

During her short-lived tenure as director, Cheatle told CBS News, “I’m very conscious as I sit in this chair now, of making sure that we need to attract diverse candidates and ensure that we are developing and giving opportunities to everybody in our workforce, and particularly women.”

“And we know that Kim Cheatle took this very seriously. We know that she made hiring decisions based on this,” Mailman argued to Fox News Digital as the agency currently boasted that 24% of their workforce were women.

“I am sure it is not easy to be a woman in any male-dominated field, including the Secret Service. But as we all remember, when the pictures of that day came out, it was immediately like these women are all cops, and they can’t find their holster,” the director and former White House attorney for Trump said. “All of the blame seems to be on women, including Kim Cheatle, all the way down. That’s what happens when you have quota systems…you turn women into tokens. That makes it really hard for women who are trying to be respected and earn their way into male-dominated fields.”

To her point, prior to the Sept. 15 attempt on Trump’s life, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley (R) brought forward a whistleblower claim that the agent in charge of the advance team for the July 13 rally was a woman who’d been promoted despite failing “one or more of her training exams when she first joined the Secret Service.”

“I mean the pattern that is emerging here,” Hawley told Fox News’s Jesse Watters, “from whistleblowers who come forward to me over and over again, is that the Trump rally was undermanned, they did not have people who had experience, and now, this advance agent I’m told, may have failed one or more of her training exams and was known not to be a top quality agent.”

Working the other side of the potential suit, seeking male plaintiffs who believe they were discriminated against for being a man, Mountain States Legal Foundation’s general counsel Will Trachman said in a statement, “Protecting candidates for President of the United States is imperative to the functioning of our Republic, and the catastrophic results of an assassination simply can’t be understated. Yet it appears that the Secret Service is prioritizing its DEI agenda over the need to hire the best person for the job, regardless of sex. If it takes a lawsuit to change that, so be it.”

Meanwhile, as the Biden-Harris administration placed FEMA in charge of disaster relief in the wake of Hurricane Helene, Mailman signaled the extent to which their lawsuit aimed to right the course of the federal government as the agency’s “Goal 1” concerning equity.

Kevin Haggerty

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