The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Department of Defense’s education agency on Tuesday, arguing that the removal of books in response to Trump administration orders infringed on the First Amendment rights of students.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, centers on a school system for children of military families run by the Defense Department.
The school system has faced pushback and student walkouts in response to a number of changes under the Trump administration, including the pausing of student affinity clubs focused on race and gender and the removal of Pride decorations at some schools.
The schools, which routinely produce some of the top reading and math scores in the country, educate more than 67,000 students in preschool through high school on military bases in the United States and abroad.
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Because Defense Department schools are run by the federal government, they have been uniquely subject to President Trump’s executive orders on education, such as an order “ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling” that criticized teaching about concepts like white privilege and rejected policies supporting transgender students’ preferred pronouns and bathrooms, for example.
Mr. Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, also called for an end to cultural awareness months in the military, such as those for Black history or women’s history, a change that applied to its schools.
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