A U.S. judge on Tuesday blocked President Donald Trump's administration from implementing the Republican's executive order requiring all transgender women be housed in federal prisons for men and ending their access to gender-affirming care.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington marked the second time that a federal judge had at the urging of LGBTQ legal rights groups prevented the U.S. Bureau of Prisons from implementing the order Trump signed on his first day back in office on Jan. 20.
Lamberth's order goes further than a Jan. 26 decision by a federal judge in Boston blocking prison officials from transferring a transgender woman to a men's facility by preventing the administration from implementing the policy at all without a further court order.
About 2,230 transgender inmates are housed in federal custodial facilities and halfway houses, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. About two thirds of them, 1,506, are transgender women, 16 of whom are housed in women's prisons.
Prior to Trump's order, the Bureau of Prisons had been operating under guidelines adopted in 2022 during Democratic former President Joe Biden's tenure requiring prisons to consider inmates' "current gender expression" when deciding where to house them.
