U.S. District Judge Amir Ali said the White House’s decision to end ASL interpretation illegally excluded deaf Americans from crucial updates from the government.
A federal judge has ordered the White House to restore real-time American Sign Language interpretation at all press briefings conducted by President Donald Trump or press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
U.S. District Judge Amir Ali said the Trump White House’s decision to end ASL interpretation illegally excluded deaf Americans from crucial updates from the government on matters of war, the economy and public health. And evidence shows, Ali noted, that closed captioning and transcripts are insufficient alternatives.
“Given the nature of the programming at issue here — regularly scheduled briefings on critical topics implicating markets, medicine, militaries, and myriads of other issues — the court finds that denying deaf Americans access to and the benefit of it presents a clear, present, and imminent harm,” Ali concluded, issuing a preliminary injunction requiring ASL interpretation to resume immediately.
The ruling is a victory for the National Association of the Deaf, which said its members had suffered since January, when the Trump White House nixed the Biden-era policy using ASL interpreters for key White House communications. The group argued that the administration’s decision to rescind ASL interpretation violated the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which was expanded in 1978 to bar the government from excluding people with disabilities from government programming and communications.
Ali stopped short of ordering a more sweeping request that NAD sought: requiring ASL interpretation at briefings by the vice president, first lady and second lady, as well as videos uploaded to White House websites and social media channels. Ali said the evidence the group presented did not support the broader demand at this phase of the lawsuit.
Ali, a Biden appointee, puzzled over a suggestion by the Trump administration that requiring ASL interpretation to accompany presidential press conferences would be a “major incursion” on the administration’s prerogatives. Disliking the “image” of ASL interpreters alongside the president is not a basis to defy the Rehabilitation Act’s requirements, Ali said.
“Moreover … ASL interpretation does not require a speaker to ‘share his platform’ with anyone,” the judge added. “The evidence shows, and the court finds, that the defendants can readily implement remote ASL interpretation without an interpreter present in the same room as the speaker.”