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The Trump administration this week sued the state of Maine, to punish the state and to take human rights away from transgender athletes. In a 31-page filing, the Trump Department of Justice essentially says that Title IX doesn’t really mean all people when it says: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
The administration’s position, when boiled down to its core, is that transgender athletes, namely transgender girls, are not covered by Title IX. They can be excluded from participation and they can be subjected to discrimination, under the administration’s reasoning, which was encapsulated in an executive order from President Donald Trump in January. Despite Trump’s false and narcissistic claims that he is the law, executive orders on their own do not change federal law and must comply with existing laws.
Maine, through Gov. Janet Mills, the state Department of Education, the Maine Principal’s Association and MSAD 51, where a transgender athlete at the center of the national debate on this issue attends school, have said they will not comply with this reading of the law — one that national experts on Title IX have said is “strange” and “wrong.”
Still, Trump, his education secretary and others have repeatedly demanded that Maine comply with his demands to essentially erase transgender girls from athletic competitions in the state. Federal funding has already been withheld and the Trump administration has threatened to withhold more if Maine doesn’t change its laws and policies, which would require action from the state Legislature.
Those demands culminated in this week’s lawsuit. If our legal system works as it should, a judge will hold hearings, read numerous court filings and weigh the competing interpretations of Title IX, along with federal and state laws, including the Maine Human Rights Act. The judge will, we hope, issue a ruling based on past precedent and the requirements of the U.S. Constitution and existing federal and state laws.
That’s how our legal system is supposed to work.
At the same time that the Trump administration is pursuing legal action against Maine, it is ignoring court orders involving the deportation of immigrants, including a man from Maryland who was — the administration admits — erroneously sent to a notorious detention facility in El Salvador.
After a local gang in El Salvador targeted Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his family, he fled to the U.S. at the age of 16. He entered the country illegally, but later applied for asylum. In 2019, an immigration judge denied Abrego Garcia’s asylum request but granted him protection from being deported back to El Salvador because of a “well-founded fear” of gang persecution.
This left him in a sort of immigration limbo but allowed him to stay in the U.S. with some legal protections. Abrego Garcia checked in with ICE yearly and the Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, his attorneys said in court filings. He was employed full time as a sheet metal apprentice. He married an American citizen and they are raising three children with disabilities.
Abrego Garcia was pulled over in Baltimore in March and detained, with authorities accusing him of being a gang member, a charge he repeatedly denied. Although he was not charged with a crime and no court hearings were held, he was sent to CECOT, a horrendous detention facility in El Salvador where an estimated 40,000 men, including 300 from the U.S., most of them not convicted of any crime, are being held in cages.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said, in a court filing, that the deportation of Abrego Garcia, who has lived in the U.S. for about 14 years, was “an administrative error.”
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered that the administration should facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States.
Still, White House officials have so far refused, instead arguing over what “facilitate” means. After a White House meeting with Trump on Monday, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele said he won’t return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. The country’s vice president said they couldn’t release Abrego Garcia because the U.S. is paying them to hold him.
Trump has chillingly bragged about building new facilities in El Salvador to house other detainees from the U.S., including American citizens.
Although the two cases are very different, they center around a common theme: The Trump administration’s disregard for the protections embedded in U.S. law and our Constitution.
If we decide that some Americans — like transgender girls — fall outside the protections of our civil rights laws, when we decree some people — like Kilmar Abrego Garcia — aren’t entitled to America’s centuries-old judicial guarantees, we’re on a very dangerous path.
It’s only two trangender girls, many people in Maine say, so why risk so much harm for them? Abergo Garcia is a man from El Salvador who’s not really American, others have said, so why worry about his whereabouts?
When we start asking questions like these, we’ve already frayed important parts of the civic fabric that holds our country and us together, namely that everyone be treated equally under the law and that our due process protections apply to everyone in America.
If transgender athletes don’t have the same rights as other athletes, what rights are we willing to give up next? If people in America, no matter their legal status, can essentially be kidnapped off our streets with no court hearing or other due process, and then essentially human trafficked to other countries and held in horrific detention centers with no hope of release, does America still believe in the rule of law? When a president wilfully ignores an order from the U.S. Supreme Court, are we still living in a democracy?
If our laws and constitutional protections do not apply equally to everyone in the U.S., we no longer have a coherent and predictable system of law and order.
That should scare all of us.
