April 30, 2026

02 U.S. Politics

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President Donald Trump’s declaration that, for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, “the party is over” was treated like a barbarian shout in the salon. Yet his statement has the impolite virtue of being true. For 75 years, Europe has hosted the most expensive open bar in history, all of it paid for by the United States, and called this dependency an “alliance.” Now, when the bill is presented and the host suggests perhaps the guests might behave as if they own something besides opinions, they are scandalized.

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Back in 2020, National “Public” Radio promoted a nasty little book called In Defense of Looting. NPR summarized the “Marxist-informed” author Vicki Osterweil in the wake of the “racial justice” rioting in cities: “She argues that looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.”

It’s interesting to imagine how they would feel if someone stole all their lame Nina Totenberg tote bags, or some transgressive activist broke in and emptied out the designer fashions in NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s residence. They are striking an anti-capitalist pose, and let’s guess it’s not the same if you commit property crimes against socialists.

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I have been doing numerous interviews about the recent DOJ indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for alleged fraud, money laundering, wire fraud, and lying to banks regarding its funding of certain individuals leading or organizing KKK and Neo-Nazi groups and events. This included the “Unite the Right” tiki torch rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

The gravamen of the Indictment is that SPLC presented itself to donors as fighting these groups when it was in bed with them, and in the course of that fraud committed several crimes.

I’ve been writing about SPLC since 2009, so I’m something of an ‘expert’ on its shenanigans. Among other things, I covered how SPLC had a KKK group (2010) and Neo-Nazi group (2012) on their Hate Map for Rhode Island despite those supposed groups having no real-world presence when I investigated and wrote about it at the time. With the addition of inflating the number of hate groups by treating each “branch” as a separate group and counting branches that appeared to be nothing more than blips on a website somewhere, SPLC arguably was a fundraising scam.

But was it criminal?

 

President Donald Trump announced there was no hurry to finalize a peace deal with the Iranian regime. He has extended the ceasefire indefinitely. For more news on Iran, read our Deep Dive Report on pg. 2.

The President also announced the Lebanon ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah has been extended for three more weeks.

Middle East crisis live: Trump says Israel-Lebanon ceasefire extended by three weeks but claims he won’t rush Iran deal | US-Israel war on Iran www.theguardian.com
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Here’s a snapshot of the latest Middle East news to bring you up to speed.

  • Donald Trump has announced that a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon would be extended by three weeks. Trump, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office alongside the participants in the meeting, said he hoped the two countries’ leaders would meet during the additional three-week cessation of hostilities.

  • When he was asked how long he was willing to wait for a long-term peace deal with Iran, he replied: “Don’t rush me”.

  • The US president had earlier ordered the US navy to “shoot and kill” small Iranian boats that deploy mines in the strait of Hormuz and claimed that US minesweepers “are clearing the strait right now” amid the standoff over the key waterway. US special forces earlier boarded a stateless oil tanker in the Indian Ocean which the Pentagon claimed was carrying Iranian crude oil, ratcheting up the standoff with Tehran over the strait.

  • Trump said the US had “hit about 75% of our targets” in Iran and that a deal had not yet been reached because Iran’s leadership was “in turmoil”.

  • Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said there were no “hardliners” or “moderates” in Iran, responding to the Trump claim of internal division in Iran’s leadership. Separately, Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, said Iranian state institutions “continue to act with unity, purpose and discipline”.

The Progressives won a major battle in the ongoing gerrymandering wars, this time scoring a narrow victory in Virginia. The ballot measure allows the progressives to change U.S. House Districts to effectively take 4 Republican seats away. The now-passed ballot measure faces legal challenges.

Dems Win In Virginia, Could Lose In Court thefederalist.com
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Democrats and their well-heeled funders have won their rigged referendum to rig Virginia’s congressional maps, but the political boundary battle isn’t over yet.

Now come the court challenges, and that’s where the redistricting revisionists could lose their big win thanks to their unabashed manipulation of Virginia law.

“It’s illegal actually for a number of reasons,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told me last week, a few days before Tuesday’s election, on The Dan O’Donnell Show in Milwaukee.

Snead asserts that Virginia Democrats, who hold the commonwealth’s political trifecta, have steamrolled the process while abandoning their plastic principles. His election watchdog organization is involved in one of several lawsuits challenging the maps and the referendum that gave Democrats the shaky imprimatur to implement them.

The FBI has leveled multiple criminal indictments against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). SPLC is accused of spending millions in dollars to fund numerous far-right hate groups, including the group behind the now-infamous Charlottsville, VA white supremacist rally.

SPLC Says It’s Under Criminal DOJ Investigation Over Its Use of Paid Informants › American Greatness amgreatness.com
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The far-left smear group Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) announced Tuesday that it is the subject of a Justice Department criminal investigation and faces possible charges regarding its past use of paid confidential informants to infiltrate alleged “extremist” organizations.

The SPLC labels dozens of conservative and religious organizations and individuals as “extremist” including Focus on the Family, PragerU, MassResistance, Turning Point USA, Gays Against Groomers, Family Research Council, Tucker Carlson, Moms For Liberty, “radical traditional Catholics,” and Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok).

In October 2014, the group even labeled conservative pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson as an “extremist” due to his opposition to same-sex marriage. In February 2015, following a sustained outcry, the SPLC removed Carson from the list and issued a public apology, stating that the profile did not “meet its standards.”

The SPLC said it believes the Trump administration is preparing legal action against some of its employees and vowed to “vigorously defend” itself, its staff, and its work against the allegations, according to the Associated Press.

“Although we don’t know all the details, the focus appears to be on the SPLC’s prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups,” CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement.

The DOJ probe follows FBI Director Kash Patel’s decision in October to sever all ties with the SPLC, accusing the group of being a “partisan smear machine” that defames mainstream Americans through its “hate map.”

After the Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, was suddenly dismissed by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, President Donald Trump issued a new shoot-on-sight order to the Navy. The move has man wondering if the now-former Secretary was dismissed for refusing to follow that same order.

Trump Gives Navy a Shoot-on-Sight Order a Day After Firing its Leader www.westernjournal.com
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A day after former Navy Secretary John Phelan was dismissed, President Donald Trump revealed he had given the Navy a major set of new orders.

The White House officially announced Wednesday that Phelan was leaving his post, but Fox News reported that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had fired Phelan.

It was unclear if there was any connection between Phelan’s departure and Trump’s Thursday post, in which he said he issued an order that could lead to the Navy firing on Iranian vessels.

“I have ordered the United States Navy to shoot and kill any boat, small boats though they may be (Their naval ships are ALL, 159 of them, at the bottom of the sea!), that is putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

“There is to be no hesitation,” Trump wrote.

“Additionally, our mine ‘sweepers’ are clearing the Strait right now. I am hereby ordering that activity to continue, but at a tripled up level!” Trump added.

The Trump administration has officially reclassified certain aspects of marijuana as being a Schedule III drug, which removes many federal criminal designations. For now, the designation only applies to state-licensed medical marijuana, though some within the administration hint more is to come.

Trump administration officially reclassifies state-licensed medical marijuana as Schedule III www.scientificamerican.com
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The Trump administration said this move, which does not legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use under federal law, is just the start of a process to reclassify the drug more broadly

A bud tender at Private Organic Therapy (P.O.T.), a nonprofit cooperative medical marijuana dispensary, displays various types of marijuana available to patients on October 19, 2009, in Los Angeles.

Updated at 11:40 AM

On Thursday the Trump administration officially reclassified state-licensed medical marijuana products under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). The move removes these products from the Schedule I category, which includes what the government considers to be high-risk and dangerous drugs such as heroin, LSD and ecstasy, to the lower-risk category of Schedule III. The change applies to state-regulated medical marijuana and does not legalize medical or recreational cannabis products on the federal level.

Using a procedure called “budget reconciliation,” the GOP-led house finally passed a bill funding ICE and Border Patrol through President Trump’s current term. The bill now goes to the House, where it is expected to barely pass, before it gets to the final passage stage.

Senate Republicans Secure ICE Funding In Late-Night ‘Vote-A-Rama’ trendingpoliticsnews.com
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Senate Republicans pushed a border-enforcement funding plan over the finish line in the early hours Thursday, advancing a measure aimed at bolstering U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol through the remainder of the Trump administration.

Using the budget reconciliation process, which allows certain legislation to pass the Senate with a simple majority, the chamber adopted the bill shortly after 3:30 a.m. Eastern following roughly six hours of debate, CBS News reported.

The overnight session featured a “vote-a-rama,” a fast-moving marathon in which senators offer amendments that receive limited debate and must be voted on.

The measure passed 50-48, with Democrats voting no. Republican Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted against it, according to the Senate roll call. Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa did not vote.

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FBI Director Kash Patel said over the weekend that federal investigators have gathered evidence supporting President Donald Trump’s long-standing position on the 2020 election, signaling that potential arrests may be forthcoming.

Speaking during an interview with Maria Bartiromo, Patel said the bureau has uncovered significant material tied to what he described as efforts to undermine the election process.

Patel Says FBI Has ‘All the Evidence’

“Absolutely, Maria,” Patel said when asked whether the FBI had found evidence related to Trump’s claims.

“I’ve been with the president nearly since day one on this.”

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U.S. importers, ranging from Target to Walmart, are due more than $160 billion in tariff refunds following a February Supreme Court decision as the Trump administration launches its claims filing portal Monday.

Hopes are high for a smooth launch of the system that will facilitate the refunds, but companies and Wall Street analysts are tempering their expectations that companies will get the money back quickly.

Trade lawyers are warning of bureaucratic hurdles, legal vulnerabilities, as well as the possibility of a last-minute appeal by the Trump administration.

“[Importers] are pessimistic that the government is going to make this easy. They’re anticipating that the government is going to make it as difficult as possible to get their money back,” said trade attorney Matthew Seligman, principal at Grayhawk Law.

“There’s frustration because the Supreme Court already ruled that these tariffs are unlawful,” he added.

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The left has tried to put Donald Trump in prison for the last decade. So far, they have not succeeded, but it’s not for a lack of trying. They’ve used every dirty trick in the book to try to eliminate their most hated political opponent. It seems like every day we find out new disturbing details about the left’s various plots to discredit and jail the president of the United States.

In Trump 2.0, they’ve become even more desperate, and they no longer limit themselves to hounding the president and his closest associates. Now, anyone who supports the president or carries out orders he issues as the lawful chief executive could find himself a target for left-wing vengeance and reprisal.

And that’s exactly what billionaire Tom Steyer, the current lead Democrat candidate for the governorship of California, the nation’s largest state, plans to do to ICE agents who dutifully carry out our nation’s immigration laws if he wins. Steyer presents his plan in no uncertain moral terms: ICE is evil because it carries out its duty, and its agents must be given no legal quarter in California.

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In the early hours of Thursday morning, Senate Republicans did what Democrats have spent months refusing to do: fund the men and women enforcing America’s immigration laws.

The chamber adopted a budget blueprint 50-48 after an all-night marathon of amendment votes known as a “vote-a-rama” that stretched past 3:30 a.m. It was a hard-fought win that moves the country one step closer to ending a self-inflicted Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown that Democrats have done nothing to resolve.

The vehicle is budget reconciliation, a parliamentary process that lets legislation clear the Senate with a simple majority rather than the 60 votes Democrats have used to block immigration enforcement funding at every turn. The goal is to unlock roughly $70 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) up front, with the full framework potentially reaching $140 billion through the end of President Trump’s term.

Republicans aren’t apologizing for the urgency. They’ve seen what happens when Democrats get power, and they have no intention of leaving the border undefended the next time it happens.

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A Chinese national was arrested April 7 after he allegedly illegally photographed U.S. Air Force planes at a military base in Nebraska, authorities said.

Tianrui Liang, 21, was charged with illegally photographing Air Force planes at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, Nebraska, which is a key base in the Air Force’s Strategic Command, according to a Justice Department (DOJ) press release. Liang crossed the U.S.-Canada border on March 28, 2026, from Vancouver to Washington on a valid B1/B2 visa, the DOJ said.

He was also allegedly at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota ahead of visiting Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. In addition, Liang was interested in visiting Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), The Associated Press (AP) reported.

The SPLC Is A Hedge Fund With A Dumb Anti-Racism Newsletter thefederalist.com
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Following the federal fraud indictment of the purportedly anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center, the usual voices on the braindead political left have depicted the controversy as a mean right-wing attack on left-wing virtue.

 

The SPLC has due process rights, and the fraud charges have to be proved in court. But before you fall for the sob story about Mean Orange Man attacking the allegedly scrappy anti-racism warriors, take a look at the SPLC’s Form 990. That’s the financial disclosure form that non-profit corporations have to file with the IRS every year. Here’s the latest, which is archived on the ProPublica website. Filed in 2025, it covers the period ending in October of 2024. With about $129 million a year in both revenue and expenses, the SPLC reported total assets of, read this number carefully, $786,768,246.

They’re closing in on an $800 million nest egg. On pg. 11 of the Form 990, you’ll find that they have close to $750 million of that money invested in securities. They own corporate stocks and they’re mad about racism, in that order.

There’s a reason the watchdog organization CharityWatch gives the SPLC an F as a charity: They keep doing aggressive fundraising while they have far more money than they need to pay for their actual work.

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The White House on Thursday accused China of stealing U.S. artificial intelligence labs’ intellectual property on an industrial scale in a memo that threatens to strain relations ahead of a summit between U.S. and Chinese leaders next month.

“The US government has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distil US frontier AI systems,” Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a memo shared on social media on Thursday and first reported by the Financial Times.

“Leveraging tens of thousands of proxy accounts to evade detection and using jailbreaking techniques to expose proprietary information, these coordinated campaigns systematically extract capabilities from American AI models, exploiting American expertise and innovation,” he added.

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The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), currently the subject of a massive federal indictment, pressured the Biden administration to release a sex offender convicted of sexually assaulting a child.

According to The Daily Wire, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) records obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request contained a 2021 email from an SPLC attorney, asking that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “release” a detained Phillipine woman who identifies as a man “as soon as possible.”

The Oversight Project reported in August 2025 that the inmate, who held a green card, had served 8 years after having been convicted of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl.

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House Republican leaders want a floor vote next week on the Senate’s budget resolution, the first step in writing an immigration enforcement bill and passing it by President Donald Trump’s June 1 deadline.

“It has to be clean because it has to be quick,” Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday, indicating that conservatives could not make major changes to the other chamber’s blueprint at this time.

But Johnson and others still have to lock in support from conservatives who are threatening to vote against it if it doesn’t encompass more top GOP policy priorities, and it is proving to be a delicate balancing act.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (La.) met Thursday morning with Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (Texas) and leaders of key House GOP factions, according to four people granted anonymity to share details of private meetings — an effort to quell concerns among some conservatives about the narrow scope of the current plan. Arrington and other senior Republicans have been pushing to expand the party-line bill currently under discussion.

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Amid growing national security concerns, the FBI said Tuesday that it has launched a broad investigation in the deaths or disappearances of at least 10 scientists and staff connected to highly sensitive research, including four from the Los Angeles area.

“The FBI is spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists. We are working with the Department of Energy, Department of War, and with our state and local law enforcement partners to find answers,” the agency said in a statement.

The FBI’s announcement comes after the House Oversight Committee announced that it would investigate reports of the disappearance and deaths of the scientists, sending letters seeking information from the agencies involved in the federal inquiry as well as NASA, which owns the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, where three of the missing or dead scientists worked.

The expected merger of television media companies Nextar and Tegna won’t happen after U.S. District Court Chief Judge Troy Nunley ended the deal, claiming the legal challenges by eight U.S. State Attorney Generals and DirecTV were likely to succeed.

Judge blocks $6.2bn merger of local TV giants Nexstar and Tegna amid fears of monopoly – The Independent
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A federal judge has halted the proposed $6.2 billion merger between local television giants Nexstar Media Group and rival Tegna, pending the resolution of an antitrust lawsuit.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Troy L Nunley issued the ruling late on Friday, concluding that eight attorneys general and DirecTV were likely to succeed in their legal challenge to prevent the deal.

The acquisition, initially announced in 2025 and approved by the Federal Communications Commission in February, would have resulted in a single company owning 265 television stations across 44 states and the District of Columbia.

SCOTUS rejected a petition by parents to challenge a Massachusetts law that allows schools to treat their children as a gender not aligned with their biological sex without parental consent, as well as their awareness.

US Supreme Court rejects Massachusetts school gender-identity policy challenge – WHTC
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The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a bid by parents to sue a public school district in Massachusetts over actions by teachers and officials to support the gender identity of students by not disclosing name or pronoun changes to parents without the child’s consent.

The justices turned ​away an appeal by the parents of a student who had self-identified as “genderqueer” while attending a middle school in ‌the Massachusetts town of Ludlow after a lower court threw out their lawsuit.

The plaintiffs claimed officials treated their child as nonbinary and hid this information from them in violation of their fundamental parental rights as protected by the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment promise of due process.

The FBI is now looking into the disappearance and deaths of numerous scientists working in the nuclear and space defense industries. The cases go back to 2022. U.S. House Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said in a letter to the FBI, “If the reports are accurate, these deaths and disappearances may represent a grave threat to U.S. national security and to U.S. personnel with access to scientific secrets.”

He later added, “Once you see the facts, it would suggest that something sinister could be happening and it would be a national security concern… Congress is very concerned about this. Our committee is making this one of our priorities now because we view this as a national security threat.”

FBI looks into dead or missing nuclear and space defense scientists fortune.com
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Almost a dozen scientists related to nuclear and space defense programs tied to NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin are dead or missing in cases as far back as 2022, and they’ve gone largely unnoticed by authorities and the public—until now.

The House Oversight Committee formally demanded answers from four federal agencies Monday on the deaths and disappearances of at least 11 American scientists and researchers with ties to NASA, nuclear research, and classified defense programs—several of them directly connected to the space defense technologies now being commercialized by SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), the chair of the Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs, sent letters to FBI Director Kash Patel, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, requesting staff-level briefings no later than April 27.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier thinks ChatGPT may have had a hand to play in a recent mass shooting event on the Florida State University campus. He declared, “My prosecutors have looked at this and they’ve told me if it was a person on the other end of that screen, we would be charging them with murder.”

He is referring to ChatGPT, whom he accuses of aiding and abetting the shooting. The AG has opened a criminal investigation into ChatGPT.

Florida opens criminal investigation into OpenAI over ChatGPT’s alleged role in FSU shooting www.cbsnews.com
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Florida’s attorney general announced Tuesday that his office has launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI after reviewing conversation logs between its generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, and a Florida State University student accused of killing two people and wounding several others after opening fire on campus last April.

Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth has ended mandatory flu vaccines for military personnel. While flu vaccines will still be offered, military personnel can now opt out of them if they so choose.

Hegseth says U.S. military no longer requires flu vaccination, drawing criticism from health experts www.scientificamerican.com
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Hegseth says U.S. military no longer requires flu vaccination, drawing criticism from health experts

The decision to no longer enforce mandatory annual flu shots for military personnel could mean more troops will get sick during flu season, one expert says

The U.S. military will no longer require service members to be vaccinated against the flu, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a social media post on Tuesday, a decision that some health experts say could endanger troops.

“The War Department is once again restoring freedom to our Joint Force. We are discarding the mandatory flu vaccine requirement, effective immediately,” Hegseth wrote in the post.

The policy stands in contrast to the current recommendations of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the country’s highest public health body, which says all Americans over the age of six months who do not have contraindications should get the annual flu shot. The CDC estimates that the vaccine saved some 12,000 lives and prevented about 180,000 hospitalizations during the 2024–2025 flu season.

A Federal Appeals Court has upheld President Trump’s XO requiring biological sex determines which prison an inmate is assigned to. The argument hinged on the claim biological males faced “cruel and unusual punishment” by being forced to be imprisoned with men.

Federal court lifts block on housing inmates by biological sex www.washingtonexaminer.com
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A federal appeals court on Friday allowed for the biologically accurate placement of transgender prisoners in accordance with President Donald Trump’s directive on housing inmates by biological sex, a ruling that incarcerated women hope will help their lawsuits aimed at moving biological males out of women’s prisons across the country.

Trump, upon taking office, issued an executive order directing the Federal Bureau of Prisons to undo a Biden-era transgender accommodation policy that placed biological males who identified as female in women-only facilities.

Seventeen transgender inmates, all biological males, then anonymously sued the Trump administration to prevent their transfer from women’s prisons. They won preliminary injunctions in district courts, which have blocked their transfers since February 2025.

Last week, a three-judge appellate panel vacated the injunctive relief, finding that the transgender litigants in Jane Doe v. Todd Blanche failed to prove that reassigning them to male-designated units would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of their Eighth Amendment rights.