GRIST FOR ADVOCATES MILL:PART II Judges Defending Public Health

Since January 20, 2025, federal judges throughout the country have taken the unusual step of issuing rulings that not only address the technical issues involved but also lambast the administration for the ineptitude of its lawyers and the patent illegality and heartlessness of its policies. On May 11, 2026, I described cases supporting gender-affirming care. Here are other judgments excoriating the administration’s assaults on public health.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Several cases stemmed from the Executive Orders President Trump issued on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) soon after returning to office, most notably #14173, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” One case began in July 2025, when three Planned Parenthood organizations challenged a Policy Notice from the Department of Health and Human Services directing them to “align” their teen pregnancy programs with the Order. New regulations included bans on LGBTQ+ content and material that “normalizes or encourages sexual activity for minors.” On October 7, Judge Beryl A. Howell of the District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the organizations, granting them a motion for summary judgment and denying the government’s motion to dismiss. “The July Policy Notice reflects agency decision-making that is motivated solely by political concerns,” she wrote, “devoid of any considered process or analysis, and ignorant of the statutory emphasis on evidence-based programming. Just because a pronouncement comes from the President does not make it true, even if expressed in the form of an executive order, and even then, does not supersede the law. Yet, the Policy Notice points to little more than these orders for justification.”

Another case originated in the National Institutes of Health’s abrupt termination of research grants as part of the attack on DEI in February 2025. Two groups sued: the American Public Health Association along with other major health research organizations and a coalition of sixteen states.

On June 16, William G. Young, a Reagan appointee to the District Court, District of Massachusetts, held a combined hearing for both lawsuits. At the end of the morning session he remarked that the grant terminations represented discrimination against the LGBTQ community. He then stated that during his forty years on the bench, he had “never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable.” He ending by paraphrasing Joseph Welch’s famous question to Senator McCarthy: “Is it true of our society as a whole, have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?” Later that afternoon, Young granted a temporary restraining order.

On July 2, Young issued a supplementary final decision, writing that in January 20, 2025, the “administration began weaponizing what should not be weaponized—the health of all Americans through its abuse of. . . NIH systems, creating chaos and promoting an unreasonable and unreasoned agenda of blacklisting topics that has absolutely nothing to do with the promotion of science or research.” He pointed as “evidence of the NIH’s grant process being abused as a bludgeon” the termination of Columbia University grants as a result of “the Administration’s perception of inaction by Columbia with respect to campus unrest. . .How the scientific and research activities had any connection with unrest issues on Columbia’s campus is conspicuously never explained. The record evidence certainly reveals none.”

Although Young had repeatedly asked the NIH lawyers for a definition of DEI, none had been forthcoming. (Apparently the officials followed the standard for pornography of knowing it when they saw it.) Instead, Young continued, the lawyers “set [DEI] up as some sort of boogeyman.” Without defining the concept “DEI becomes whatever DEI means to the Public Officials untethered to anything.” He acknowledged that “every Administration has political priorities and enjoys the ability to make policy changes.” “But,” he continued, “the agencies that implement those changes have to have a reasoned and reasonable explanation for doing so. . .The Public Officials in their haste to appease the Executive simply moved too fast and broke things, including the law.”

On July 3, NIH filed an emergency motion to stay the District Court’s order in the Court of Appeals of the First Circuit. When that court denied the motion, the agency appealed to the Supreme Court, which used its emergency docket to partially grant the stay. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. “Make no mistake” she wrote. Evidence in the District Court demonstrated that “the forward march of scientific discovery will not only be halted—it will be reversed. . .Years long studies will lose validity. Animal subjects will be euthanized. Life-saving medication trials will be abandoned. Countless researchers will lose their jobs.” Moreover, she continued, “scientific advancement lifts all boats. The harm is not just to researchers who will lose their livelihoods; vulnerable members of our society will also lose the benefits of their research.”

Conversion Therapy

Jackson was even more scathing in her dissent to the Supreme Court’s decision on March 31, 2026 supporting a challenge to Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy. “Ultimately,” she wrote, “because the majority plays with fire in this case, I fear that the people of this country will get burned.” The majority “appears to have made this momentous decision without adequately grappling with the potential long-term and disastrous implications of this ruling. The fallout could be catastrophic.” She continued, “The Court could be ushering in an era of unprofessional and unsafe medical care administered by effectively unsupervised healthcare providers. A state license used to mean something to the patients who entrust their care to licensed professionals. . .That stops today.” Jackson concluded that the Court’s decision “opens a dangerous can of worms. It threatens to impair States’ ability to regulate the provision of medical care in any respect. It extends the Constitution into uncharted territory in an utterly irrational fashion. And it ultimately risks grave harm to Americans’ health and wellbeing.”

Conditions in Detention Centers

When Sergio Alberto Barco Mercado, an immigrant from Peru, arrived at 26 Federal Plaza, Manhattan, (often called 26Fed) on August 8, 2025 for a scheduled citizenship hearing, ICE took him into custody and detained him at that facility. (The plaza was the site of numerous protests against ICE).Within hours of his arrest, Mercado sued the government, arguing that the conditions in the detention hold were inhumane. Four days later, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the District Court of the Southern District of New York granted a temporary restraining order, barring ICE from holding people at 26 Fed unless conditions were drastically improved.

When Kaplan certified the class of plaintiffs and granted a preliminary injunction on September 17, he issued an 86-page opinion. It began with a list of the conditions at 26 Fed that were “essentially undisputed.” Those included that the rooms housed as many as 90 detainees, many were held for more than 72 hours and denied attorney visits, and before August 18 detainees slept on the concrete floor, were provided with rations only twice a day, and could not bathe or shower.

Kaplan then elaborated. “Sleep is a basic human need,” he wrote. “Conditions that prevent or interfere with sleep in some circumstances may rise to the level of a constitutional violation.” Detainees not only had no chance to bathe or shower but also “were denied basic hygiene items, such as clean clothing, and adequate soap, sanitary wipes, toothbrushes, and menstrual products.” Dozens of detainees had to “share one or a few toilets, which sometimes were inoperable.” With only two small rations of food a day, “detainees were persistently hungry.” They also were denied medical care and access to lawyers.

Kaplan added that these conditions demonstrated “deliberate indifference,” a phrase courts have used interpreting the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment: “The defendants, at a minimum, recklessly failed to act with reasonable care to mitigate the risk of the foregoing challenged conditions to the detainees at 26 Fed. These conditions were largely self-evident, subjects of widespread public reporting, and posed excessive risk to detainees’ health.”

Finally, Kaplan explained why the conditions should be considered punitive as well as inhumane: “Statements from senior officials suggest that harsh conditions of confinement are a deliberate feature of the enforcement program intended to induce self-deportation and to deter illegal immigration. Indeed, DHS has launched a national advertising campaign encouraging self-deportation, and Secretary Kristi Noem acknowledged that ICE selected a notoriously harsh state prison as an ICE detention center for aliens charged with violent crimes in part to encourage self-deportation.” Comments by the guards similarly suggested the conditions were “intended to be punitive and to induce self-deportation.”

On May 18, 2026, Judge P. Kevin Castel of the District Court of the Southern District of New York barred ICE from making arrests in New York City immigration courts.

Like some of the cases described in the May 11 post, some of the ones portrayed above have been overturned. But that is not the point. In these perilous times, judgments defending public health deserve far more attention.

Sources:

Mercado v. Noem, SDNY Kaplan (8/12/25) (TRO)

Mercado v Noem, SDNY Kaplan (9/17/25) (Preliminary Injunction)

American Public Health Association v. National Institutes of Health, D Ma Young (6/23/25) (Proposed Partial Final Judgment)

American Public Health Association v. National Institutes of Health, D Ma Young (7/2/25) (Preliminary Injunction)

Chiles v. Salazar, USSC Jackson (dissenting) (3.31.26)

Massachusetts v. Kennedy, D Ma Young (6/23/25) (hearing transcript)

National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association, USSC Jackson (8/21/25)

Planned Parenthood of Greater New York v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, DDC Howell (10.7.25)