Featured Cases

In early 2021, former President Donald J. Trump declassified a binder of documents related to the FBI’s abusive “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. The Presidential Records Act gives a former president the absolute right to access records from his administration and the right to give that same level of access to any representative he chooses. President Trump designated journalist John Solomon as a representative to access the binder from the National Archives. Yet, even though the law requires the National Archives to let Mr. Solomon review the binder, it continues to deny access. Instead, the National Archives transferred the documents to the Department of Justice and continues to refuse to provide Mr. Solomon access to the records.

South Carolina law allows only certain legislative caucuses - those formed around party, race, or gender - to raise money and engage in the full range of protected free speech. The House Democratic Caucus, House Republican Caucus, the Black Caucus, and the Women’s Caucus can speak freely, but ideologically-oriented groups like the Freedom Caucus (and the Progressive Caucus) may not. Instead, the members of these caucuses face criminal penalties for exercising their First Amendment rights. South Carolina’s law restricting speech “based on the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker” is blatantly unconstitutional.

On January 10, 2023, the Illinois Governor signed into law a ban on the sale, purchase, and possession of rifles and standard capacity magazines. Cook County and the City of Chicago already had restrictive gun laws in place. All of the restrictions, in this case, contravene the Second Amendment, which protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. As the Supreme Court has stated, this right is not a “second-class right” from all others in the Bill of Rights, and while States may regulate “dangerous and unusual weapons,” those in “common use” are undeniably beyond any state’s power to ban.

AFL represented Helen Levinson, a mother of two, born to a family of Christian Arab immigrants from Jordan and raised in Chicago, who stood up against a school teacher for promoting highly racialized and progressive viewpoints in her school district. One teacher from outside Helen’s school district would aggressively protest at her district’s school board meeting. At one point, Helen needed a security escort to leave a meeting. Based on this type of behavior, Helen wrote a letter to the teacher’s school board, providing examples of the teacher’s conduct, and requesting the board review whether this was in compliance with their code of conduct. In response, the teacher sued Helen. This lawsuit violated IL’s Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) law. You cannot file a lawsuit in an attempt to keep someone from exercising their constitutional rights. We partnered with Sorin Leahu, who was already defending Helen, to combat this lawfare from the teacher.

AFL requested through FOIA that the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Division provide all email communications between its employees and the Legal Director at the American Civil Liberties Union, David Cole. DOJ refused to even conduct a search in response to the request, claiming that the search would be too burdensome because DOJ would have to get the consent from each of its employees in the Civil Division before searching their email accounts. Essentially, DOJ decided that each individual employee should get to have a veto over whether DOJ would respond to the FOIA request.

The Lehigh County District Attorney investigated ballot drop boxes in Lehigh County in the 2021 general election and found that hundreds of void ballots had been deposited into drop boxes and were subsequently counted by the Board. Lehigh County refused to remedy these issues and put in place sufficient security measures to protect our elections.

The Chester County Board of Elections placed dropboxes in the community with cameras attached. After investigations by local patriots, it became clear that many people were depositing multiple ballots. A person is only authorized to deposit their ballot into a ballot dropbox in PA. In one instance, a man appeared to fill out two ballots while waiting in his car and then deposited both ballots into the ballot dropbox.

ATF is attempting to reduce Americans’ access to firearms by revoking federal firearms licenses (FFL), the license required to run a gun store, for minor paperwork errors. The ATF has begun arbitrarily labeling minor errors as “willful violations” of the Gun Control Act, absent any actual indication of willfulness or intent by the FFL holder. This is a stark departure from the longstanding practices of the ATF where they used to work with gun dealers to reduce paperwork errors.

The West Shore School District’s Social Emotion Learning curriculum teaches children “virtues and values” that go against the beliefs of Christian parents in the school district. The parents requested that their children be excused from this SEL curriculum as it does not reflect the values, morals, and beliefs in the parent’s religion. After initially accepting the religious exemption, the school district reversed its course and informed the parents that they would not honor the right to have children excused from the SEL curriculum.

Statistical evidence obtained from six medical schools in the State of Texas reveals that the schools are using race and sex preferences in their admissions policies in violation of Title VI, Title IX, and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Federal law prohibits race-based discrimination in hiring and contracting. Texas A&M created a faculty hiring program with dedicated funding and positions set aside for candidates from “underrepresented minority groups.” In short, instead of considering applicants based on their qualifications, Texas A&M sought to reserve certain positions for candidates based solely on their skin color.

For over a century, this school district has prohibited biological males and biological females from using the same intimate facilities, even disciplining students for violating this rule. At a school board meeting on September 13, 2021, a faculty member proposed changing the longstanding rules and asked the Board to allow students to use facilities of their preferred “gender identity.” On January 10, 2022, the Board announced it had adopted the proposed change, claiming it was necessary to comply with the law without public discussion, deliberation, or voting. This violated Ohio state law, providing that “any resolution, rule, or formal action of any kind is invalid unless adopted in an open meeting of the public body.”

Under the guise of “diversity,” Amazon is offering a $10,000 bonus to its delivery service partners — but only for those partners who are black, Latino, or Native American. Asian Americans and whites are categorically ineligible for this racially discriminatory stipend. This is a flagrant violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guarantees citizens of every race and color the same right to make and enter into contracts with others.

The Biden Administration’s Department of Education created a “National Parents and Families Engagement Council” to serve as a partisan, hand-selected committee to mask the Biden Administration’s devastatingly anti-child and anti-family actions. The Biden Administration stacked the Council’s composition with representatives of liberal donors and supporters. If allowed to operate, the Administration intended to use the Council to provide the imprimatur of approval of the Administration’s actions and, in turn, use that seal of approval to bludgeon parents and political opponents who disagreed with the Administration’s policies.

Pennsylvania lost a congressional seat in the 2020 census, requiring the Pennsylvania General Assembly to draw a new congressional map for the 2022 elections. In January 2022, Pennsylvania’s General Assembly approved a congressional map that Governor Wolf vetoed for being insufficiently Democratic, even though the Assembly-approved map would have created a 9-8 majority of Democratic-leaning congressional districts. In response to this impasse, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, where Democrats hold a 5-2 majority, imposed a more partisan Democratic map backed by the Elias Law Group, a leftist redistricting firm operated by Democratic Party operative Marc Elias.

Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court’s actions violated the Elections Clause of the Constitution, which clearly and unmistakably states that “[t]he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” The language of the Elections Clause makes no allowance for a state supreme court to impose a congressional map by unilateral decree.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued an edict claiming that Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, with no exceptions for anyone. The EEOC had been using this edict to sue Christian-owned businesses that didn’t conform to the edict, which compelled employers to “allow employees into restrooms that correspond to the employees’ gender identity, no matter the individual’s biological sex, whether the individual has had a sex-change operation, or whether other employees have raised objections or privacy concerns.”

Former President Barack Obama and his allies in Congress created section 2713 of the Affordable Care Act, which empowered the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (“PSTF”) to decide the “preventative care” that all private health insurance must cover, even though none of the Task Force’s members were appointed as “officers of the United States” in conformity with Article II of the Constitution. In effect, the PSTF amounted to an unelected, unaccountable group of elite technocrats who unilaterally dictated which services all Americans with health insurance must subsidize—resulting in higher premiums and disruptions to the healthcare system in the United States.

In 2020, President Trump lawfully appointed Sean Spicer and Russ Vought to serve three year terms on the Board of Visitors for the Naval Academy. In an unprecedented move, the Biden Administration attempted to remove them and replace them with radical left-wing progressive ideologues.

In 2021, in the name of “antiracism” and “equity,” the School District of Philadelphia announced that starting with the 2022–23 school year, it was changing its selection process for criteria-based schools from a race-neutral process to a racially discriminatory process. The school district did so despite 62% of the students attending those schools identifying as black or Latino and with no schools having a white majority.

Loudoun County Public Schools adopted Regulation 8040, which prohibits school staff from talking to parents about any issue related to the “gender identity” of their children, unless the child consents. The school district also implemented critical race theory into its curriculum and allowed teachers to discuss topics like race, sex, and religion in an age-inappropriate manner.

The Department of Health and Human Services issued an edict that interpreted section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act as prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Practically speaking, this meant that a man who claimed to be a woman could seek medical treatment from a doctor—treatment that would only be provided to a woman—and then file a claim of discrimination against the doctor with the Biden Department of Health and Human Services. A finding by HHS that a doctor engaged in discrimination could result in disastrous consequences for that doctor, including financial penalties and the loss of access to any insurance providers that receive funding from the federal government. The HHS edict would have led to Doctors across the United States having to provide transgender medical services–including prescribing “puberty blockers,” “hormone therapy” for children, and referrals for surgeries that result in castration, sterilization, and genital mutilation.

The Trump Administration had used 42 U.S.C. § 265 (Title 42) to immediately expel over 1 million illegal border crossers during the COVID Pandemic Health Emergency. The Biden Administration initially continued this policy but later sought to stop removing illegal entrants while maintaining other Pandemic-related measures. This would have allowed the Biden Administration to import a large number of illegal aliens into the United States.

The Federal government violated the Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”), the Public Health Service Act of 1944 (“PHSA”), and the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) by abandoning preexisting protections against the introduction of illegal aliens infected with COVID-19 into the state of Texas. By causing an influx of aliens who are or might be infected with COVID-19, the Biden administration has put the public health of Texas and the United States in peril, as well as having weakened the economies of Texas and the United States as the economy attempts to recover from the effects of the pandemic.

Under the guise of preventing illegal aliens from crossing the southern land border, the Biden Administration created a new blatantly unlawful program that will permit up to 360,000 aliens to be “paroled” into the United States every year—despite no authorization from Congress to do so and even though these aliens do not have visas. The new program actually allows aliens in their home countries to obtain the benefit of securing advance approval to enter the United States—despite no other basis in law for them doing so (i.e., these are not visas).