By James Esseks, Director, ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & HIV Project

Last week, a federal appeals court ruled that the Commonwealth of Kentucky was liable for $224,000 for the actions of Kim Davis, who refused to do her job and issue marriage licenses (to same-sex or different-sex couples) as county clerk.

While Davis’ story made national headlines, her case isn’t the only one in the past year where a court case filed by the ACLU has led to a bill for discrimination for the actions of a government official. It isn’t the officials that have to pay out, however. It is the taxpayers of the jurisdiction that violated LGBTQ people’s rights.

WISCONSIN - Alina Boyden and Shannon Andrews

Alina and Shannon are state employees in Wisconsin. Both were denied gender-affirming care under the state’s insurance plan. In order to pay for her care, Shannon dipped into her retirement fund. Alina put off some gender-affirming care.

After Shannon and Alina spoke before a jury, Shannon was awarded $479,000 and her co-plaintiff, Alina, was awarded $301,000. When combined with costs and fees associated with the case, taxpayers were sent a bill for $1,670,000.

Read the case

IOWA - Jesse Vroegh

Jesse Vroegh was a staff nurse at the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women (ICIW) for over seven years. When he asked for gender-affirming health care along with use of the men’s locker room, he was denied.

Jesse also had to appear before a jury and have his life put under a microscope. In the end, the jury said what happened to Jesse was unjust and awarded him $120,000.

Read the case

In a non-ACLU case, an Iowa jury determined that another state employee who faced employment discrimination for being gay was owed $1.5 million in June.

These numbers do not include the millions of dollars Kentucky, Iowa and Wisconsin have spent on their own attorneys to defend these discriminatory actions.

Being turned away when seeking a marriage license was humiliating for our clients. Being denied medically necessary health care is dangerous. Being told that you cannot use the same facilities that any other employee uses is isolating. And, sadly, the Trump administration thinks this is OK.

These cases aren’t just about the damages awards, they are about seeking justice.

If you are a taxpayer that is upset about paying this bill, the answer is simple: tell your officials not to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

After seeing states like Alabama and Georgia pass one extreme abortion ban after another, other states are starting to push back. Last week, governors in Illinois, Maine, and Vermont signed historic bills to protect abortion rights or expand access to abortion care in their states. This follows action last month in Nevada; other states, including California, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, may not be far behind.

Illinois’ and Vermont’s bills both recognize abortion and other reproductive rights as “fundamental,” ensuring that they will remain protected in those states, regardless of what happens to Roe v. Wade, the embattled Supreme Court decision that recognized a constitutional right to abortion. We haven’t seen such robust protections in a generation, when a similar set of state bills passed in the early 90s in response to the last existential threat to Roe.

This move is especially important in Illinois, which is surrounded by states that are hostile to abortion rights and already serves as a refuge for those who cannot obtain care in places like neighboring Missouri, where the last abortion clinic hangs by a thread.

In the meantime, Maine has enacted two new laws. The first allows qualified health care professionals like nurse practitioners to provide safe abortion care, increasing the number of publicly-accessible health centers where someone can get an in-clinic abortion procedure from 3 up to 18. The second guarantees that abortion will be covered in public and private health care plans.

This isn’t a coincidence. Activists have worked for years to lay the foundation for these wins, but the political will to push these bills over the finish line was prompted by the overreach of abortion opponents and by a desire to set up a “firewall…to protect access to reproductive healthcare for everyone,” as one bill sponsor put it.

The bigger picture is that the extreme abortion bans enacted in recent months in the Midwest and South – seven at the last count – are actually the culmination of a sustained and concerted effort to outlaw abortion throughout the country.

Over the past decade, anti-abortion lawmakers have quietly passed 479 medically-unnecessary and politically-motivated restrictions on abortion under the guise of protecting women’s health. But in reality, such measures are designed to shame patients, shut down clinics, and push abortion care out of reach.

While many of these unconstitutional laws have been struck down in the courts, the strategy has still been quite successful. Six states have only one abortion clinic left and millions of people live more than 100 miles from the nearest clinic. These abortion restrictions have stayed under the radar so as not to wake the sleeping giant that is the majority of Americans who want abortion to remain legal and available to those who need it.

But, emboldened by Trump’s appointment of two new justices to the Supreme Court, anti-abortion politicians could not maintain their façade any longer. They are now openly passing bans in the hope that their state’s law might be the vehicle the Supreme Court ultimately uses to overturn Roe.

However, their shift in strategy has meant that everyday people are now starting to understand the very real threat that exists – 72 percent of respondents in a recent poll said they believe the right to abortion is at risk in this country.

And they are fighting back.

Last month, tens of thousands of people took to the streets at more than 500 events in every state to express their outrage over these extreme bans. And just last week, more than 180 companies, whose workforce totals over 100,000 employees, signed a “Don’t Ban Equality” pledge in support of legal abortion. There also has been a surge in donations to abortion funds that help people get the care they need.

Lawmakers, in turn, are heeding the call – and not just progressive ones. Vermont’s bill was signed by a Republican governor, a reminder that this issue need not be so partisan and a sign of the potency of this current political moment.

While these victories should be celebrated, our rights should not depend on where we live and no one should have to travel out of state to get the care they need. For now, abortion is still legal in all 50 states and we must fight to make sure it stays that way. 

At the same time, we can continue to shore up state protections in order to safeguard the important, personal decision of whether to have a child; defend the rights of pregnant people at a time when the stakes have never been higher; and ensure a future in which health needs, not politics, always dictate the care a person receives.

President Trump announced today that former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Thomas Homan will return to his administration as “border czar,” a new post he described during an interview with “Fox & Friends.”

The news comes immediately after we’ve learned even more shocking revelations about the treatment of migrant families and children in U.S. custody, including along the border. But Homan’s appointment will likely intensify the cruelty of the administration’s border policies.

Homan was one of three administration officials, including current Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kevin McAleenan, who signed a memo to now-former  Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen which paved the way for the family separation policy. The memo stated that DHS could “permissibly direct the separation of parents or legal guardians and minors held in immigration detention so that the parent or legal guardian can be prosecuted.”  It also recommended that the department “pursue prosecution of all amenable adults who cross our border illegally, including those presenting with a family unit, between ports of entry.”  Thousands of parents and children continue to suffer the consequences of this viciously cruel decree.

While Homan was the one who recommended the policy of family separation, he tried to blame everybody but himself. He claimed that “you’d have to put the blame on the parents” for family separation and echoed Trump’s false talking point that Democrats in Congress were the ones responsible for the policy. In reality, it was a decision made and put into practice by none other than the Trump administration itself.

Under Homan’s leadership, ICE ramped up its arrests; targeted so-called sanctuary communities; pushed for extending detentions of pregnant women and presided over two dozen deaths in custody; retaliated against immigrant rights activists; arrested unsuspecting people who showed up to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices for routine interviews; and apprehended people going to court hearings, including survivors of domestic violence.

ICE also showed a pattern of dishonesty under his leadership, systematically ignoring clear violations of basic detention standards at their brutal detention facilities and even going so far as to mislead a judge in one case in order to accelerate efforts to detain and deport Iraqi-Americans.

Homan defended ICE’s growing number of arrests of people without criminal records by insisting that all immigrants without immigration status ”[s]hould be uncomfortable. You should look over your shoulder and you need to be worried,” he said. Public officials who adopt so-called sanctuary policies to advance their communities’ public safety, Homan said, should be arrested.

Since leaving ICE, Homan joined the Fox News Channel as a contributor, where he has continued to push anti-immigrant messages to a broader public and the network’s number one fan in the White House. On Fox, Homan doubled down on his rhetoric, boasting that “there should be fear in the immigrant community,” and urging the president to close the U.S.-Mexican border.

While it is still unclear what Homan’s new position entails, his record should disqualify him from any position in the federal government—and particularly one that will once again put him in a position to subject children and families to unconscionable treatment.  Congress must continue to use its oversight power to hold Homan accountable for anti-immigrant abuse.