Twelve students from schools operated by the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) are suing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, after ordering the removal of books from DoDEA school libraries on race and gender. While the books were removed to bring the schools in compliance with orders from the Trump administration, the students and their families argue that removing these books impedes their First Amendment rights.

The plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), filed a complaint on Tuesday, April 15 against the DoDEA and Secretary Hegseth. The ACLU argues that the defendants had harmed their clients’ First Amendment rights irreparably by sanctioning the censorship of “DEI-related material” related to diversity, equity, and inclusivity efforts. The books’ removal endangers the well-being of the students by preventing them from learning critical information about health, hygiene, biology, and abuse, the lawsuit says.

Related

Most book ban requests are coming from organizations & officials. They’re targeting LGBTQ+ authors.
Individual parents are not behind efforts to ban books. This is not a grassroots effort.

The 12 plaintiffs in this case come from five families in the military whose children attend DoDEA schools in the U.S., Italy, and Japan, ranging from pre-kindergarten to high school. Their lawsuit argues that the limitations of the allowed material set by the DoDEA creates an education environment that is vastly limited compared to public schools in America, putting these students at an unfair disadvantage with the rest of the country.

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“The quality of children’s education, their exposure to ideas, and the preparing of citizens in the next generation are all being harmed by this censorship,” ACLU senior attorney Emerson Sykes stated. “This is not how public schools are supposed to work – students have a right to learn and to access information that should be above the political fray.”

The censorship was spurred by President Donald Trump signing three executive orders that called for the end of DEI programs in K-12 programs and the military as well as an end to “promoting gender ideology,” which means informing and educating people about the existence of trans people.

From this point, Pete Hegseth, a known Trump loyalist, instructed DoDEA schools to pull any curriculum or material related to immigration, race, sexuality, and gender. This directive resulted in the removal of classroom portraits of Michelle Obama and Harriet Tubman and a refusal to observe Women’s and Black History Month in future lessons.

The ACLU, in its filing, pointed to this as unconstitutional and referred to it as “whitewashing curricula in its civilian schools”.

According to the free speech organization PEN America, book bans have primarily targeted books written by LGBTQ+ authors and authors of color, including books that highlight slavery in America, racism, homophobia, sexism, and the Holocaust.

In the week the ACLU filed its lawsuit, the DoDEA expanded its library purges of K-12 schools to military colleges, removing almost 400 titles from the U.S. Naval Academy Library. These included Janet Jacobs’s Memorializing the Holocaust, which discusses female victims of the Holocaust. More disturbingly, two copies of Adolf Hitler’s self-aggrandizing autobiography Mein Kampf are allowed to remain in the library, according to the New York Times.

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