Update: On March 3, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued an order granting the motion for a Temporary Restraining Order and Preliminary Injunction, blocking enforcement of the law for our plaintiffs.

Case Overview

On February 10, 2025, GLAD Law, along with National Center for Lesbian Rights and Lowenstein Sandler LLP, filed a federal constitutional challenge to President Trump’s Executive Order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which Trump issued just hours after his inauguration on January 20, 2025.

The Order directly targets transgender people by attempting to deny them legal recognition under federal law and to strip them of long-established legal protections with the stroke of a pen. Under this Order, transgender women who are incarcerated in federal prisons will be unlawfully transferred to men’s facilities and denied medically necessary health care.

Our client Jane Jones is an adult transgender woman who has lived as a woman for years. Previous to the Executive Order, she was serving her sentence in a minimum security women’s facility. During her term of incarceration, she has always been treated as a woman by federal correctional officials and her peers. Other than during a brief period of time after the issuance of the Executive Order, she has never been housed in a men’s facility.

Jane is not safe in any men’s prison. She will be at an extremely high risk of harassment, abuse, violence, and sexual assault. Not only that, but being cut off from her medical care will cause additional harm. In addition to being unconstitutional, Trump’s Executive Order is disruptive and cruel, and singles out transgender women like Jane, putting them in additional harm’s way within the prison system.

This case was originally called Jones v. Trump.

Jones v. Bondi is one of the three lawsuits GLAD Law and NCLR have filed challenging sections of the Executive Order that directs the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to house transgender women in men’s prisons and to unlawfully withhold necessary medical care. Learn more about the other cases Doe v. Bondi and Moe v. Trump.