An attorney for several incarcerated transgender women argued Wednesday that the Trump administration violated a court order by transferring them to a segregated prison unit, and urged a federal judge to enforce the order. Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the US District Court for the District of Columbia heard the argument in Doe v. McHenry, No. 1:25-cv-00286 (since consolidated with two related suits and captioned Jane Doe v. Blanche) on the plaintiffs’ motion to return them to the general population of women’s prisons and to bar any further transfers into the segregated unit.

The dispute stems from a June 7 preliminary injunction in which Lamberth directed prison officials to house the plaintiffs in women’s prisons or women’s halfway houses. He also enjoined enforcement of part of Executive Order 14168 (“the EO”), which President Donald Trump signed on Jan. 20, 2025. Section 4(a) of that order (“the Transfer Provision”) instructs the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to ensure that males are not housed in women’s facilities; Section 4(c) directs the discontinuation of gender-affirming medical care. Under Sections 2(b) and 2(e) of the EO, “male” means “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell,” while “women” and “girls” mean “adult and juvenile human females,” respectively.

Lamberth did not rule from the bench on the plaintiffs’ request. He did appear to agree with the plaintiffs’ attorney, however, saying that the transfers appear to violate his order “on its face” by isolating the plaintiffs and stripping them of the privileges they had held in women’s facilities. He pressed the government’s attorney, M. Jared Littman, on whether the administration was defying the injunction. Littman responded that, by its terms, they were not.

The plaintiffs’ suit alleges that the executive order’s prison provisions amount to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment, and their motion to enforce extends that argument to the segregated unit. According to the motion, the Bureau of Prisons moved four of the women held at FMC Carswell in Fort Worth into a restrictive unit with little or no access to recreation, work, or programming, and is preparing to transfer the rest there. the conditions are harsher than in a women’s prison and have worsened their gender dysphoria, which is associated with depression and suicidal ideation. They call their treatment an end-run around the June injunction, achieving the executive order’s goal by means the court never authorized.

Federal law generally bars segregated housing units for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex prisoners under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). The only exception comes with a consent decree, legal settlement, or court judgment; the government casts the Carswell wing as falling within that exception. The litigation thus tests how far the executive order can reach: whether categorical rules on biological sex housing and gender-affirming care limitations can displace PREA’s individualized, safety-based assessments without violating the Eighth Amendment. The Carswell dispute also puts two of the administration’s court defeats in tension: the Northern District of Texas Fleming v. Rule injunction requires transgender women at the facility to be held apart from cisgender women, even as Lamberth’s order bars transferring them to men’s prisons. The government has invoked the former to justify consolidating the Doe plaintiffs in the segregated wing.

The government’s appeal of Lamberth’s earlier housing injunctions is already pending before the D.C. Circuit, where the Jane Doe cases have been consolidated. Alexander Shalom of Lowenstein Sandler argued the motion for the plaintiffs.