A federal judge on Tuesday under the Department of Defense, under Secretary Pete Hegseth, to return nearly 600 books to the library of five schools on military installations. File Photo by Yuri Gripas/UPI | License Photo
A federal judge has ordered the Department of Defense to return nearly 600 books on race and gender to libraries at several U.S. military schools, ruling that President Donald Trump’s executive orders that led to their removal likely violate the First Amendment.
U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles on Monday ordered the books to be restored to the libraries of five schools on U.S. military installation in Virginia, Kentucky, Italy and Japan, while barring the Trump administration from further altering their curriculum.
“This ruling is a solid first step in a long road to restoring and protecting students’ freedom to read in schools run for military families, and we hope this decision will serve as useful precedent in other courts,” PEN America’s Freedom to Read Program Director Kasey Meehan said in a statement Tuesday.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has led a charge to remove left-leaning ideology from government, public and private spaces via his executive powers.
Three executive orders issued by Trump in January directed the removal and prohibition of material concerning gender ideology, so-called divisive concepts on race and sex and gender ideology as well as “un-American” theories from the federal government and K-12 schools.
In March, the Department of Defense Education Activity began removing books, such as ABC of Equality and You Call This Democracy? from its 161 schools in 11 foreign countries, seven states and two territories.
The next month, six families of 12 students ranging in age from pre-kindergarten to high school sued the federal government to stop the Trump administration from banning books and material it finds politically incorrect, arguing the “system-wide censorship” was a violation of their First Amendment rights.
In her ruling granting the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction on Monday, Giles stopped short of ordering the Pentagon to restore the pulled books to all of the DoDEA schools and only directed it to return the books to the five schools the plaintiffs attend.
“Plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of showing that Defendants’ stated motivations for removing over 500 library books set forth an impermissible partisan or political motivation,” the President Joe Biden appointee said.
She added that the ruling might be different if the DoDEA removed the books because of “educational suitability” and that while the government argues their removal was over “pedagogical concern” she is not persuaded as Trump’s executive orders have generalized directives without a particular focus on education.
The removals do not focus on books that contain offensive language or are inappropriate for the age group, which are reasons deemed proper to base book removals on, according to legal precedent, she said.
“Moreover, the faulty implementation of the removals suggests that the removals were not rooted in pedagogical concerns,” she wrote.
“Thus, the Defendants removed books with any inkling of the partisan ideas central to the EOs, without even completing the detailed review process, further evinces the improper partisan motivation underlying their actions.”
Emerson Sykes, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, celebrated the ruling, calling it “an important victory” in a statement.
“The censorship taking place in DoDEA schools as a result of these executive orders was astonishing in its scope and scale, and we couldn’t be more pleased that the court has vindicated the First Amendment rights of the students this has impacted,” Sykes said.
