A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a Bureau of Prisons policy designed to phase out taxpayer-funded hormone treatments and other transgender accommodations for federal inmates, ruling that prison officials likely violated federal administrative law when adopting the policy.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth issued a new preliminary injunction in Kingdom v. Trump, preventing the Bureau of Prisons from enforcing its recent February policy changes and ordering officials to continue providing transgender-identifying inmates with drugs and social accommodations under policies that existed before President Donald Trump’s executive order, which informed the prison policy. The court stayed that policy while litigation continues, ordering prison officials to maintain the status quo while litigation proceeds.
The ruling came the same day a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit granted the Justice Department’s request to pause a separate order renewing an earlier injunction in the case, a decision that was quickly overtaken when, roughly two hours later, Lamberth issued his updated preliminary injunction that for now governs the dispute. The appeals court said the Trump administration was likely to succeed in defending its policy as legal and that Lamberth had likely overstepped his authority by blocking it the first time.
Kingdom is one of several cases backed by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking to defend Biden administration-era policies that allowed taxpayer funds to be spent on inmates’ hormone treatments, as well as a separate policy that allowed biological men to be housed in women’s prison facilities.
Trump’s Day One executive order directed federal agencies to stop spending taxpayer funds on procedures or drugs intended to help inmates “conform” to the opposite sex. In response, the Bureau of Prisons adopted a policy that complied with the executive order by barring hormone and drug regimens for new inmates, prohibiting transgender-related surgeries and accommodations, and requiring inmates already receiving hormones to be tapered off the drugs over time.
Lamberth, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, emphasized that his decision was focused on whether the Bureau of Prisons followed the correct procedure in implementing its policy.
“With this Opinion, the Court has no intention of wading into the culture war being waged against transgender individuals,” Lamberth wrote, adding that the case turns on whether the Bureau of Prisons followed required administrative procedures when adopting the policy.
Rather than deciding constitutional claims, Lamberth concluded the inmates were likely to succeed on their Administrative Procedure Act challenge.
He found prison officials likely acted arbitrarily and capriciously “in part, on the lack of reasoned explanation for the policy,” and by failing to consider the bureau’s own experience providing transgender-related drugs adequately.
The Justice Department is likely to appeal his order, similar to the appeal that was decided by the D.C. Circuit earlier on Wednesday.
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The ruling comes as Lamberth is also overseeing a separate challenge to the Trump administration’s prison housing policy for transgender-identifying inmates.
Earlier this month, he blocked prison officials from transferring 14 biological men who identify as women in federal custody to men’s facilities, finding they were likely to succeed in their claims that the policy would expose them to a heightened risk of violence and other harms. That injunction remains in place while the litigation proceeds.