Justice Department Sues New York Over Law Forcing Catholic Nursing Homes to House Men With Women

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department announced Tuesday it is intervening in a federal lawsuit on behalf of a Catholic order of nuns, challenging a New York state law that requires residential hospice care facilities to house biological men with women and use pronouns reflecting gender identity rather than biological sex.

The United States filed a Complaint-in-Intervention supporting the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who operate Rosary Hill Home, a skilled nursing facility that provides free palliative care to indigent cancer patients. The lawsuit argues that New York Public Health Law § 2803-c-2 violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by requiring religious facilities to meet requirements that conflict with their beliefs while excusing non-religious facilities from the same obligations.

“States should take notice that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of woke gender ideology,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “For more than a century, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have provided free palliative care to indigent cancer patients in their last days. New York’s law would force these religious women to choose between their faith and their license if they wish to continue serving the dying.”

New York’s law requires long-term care facilities to assign rooms to transgender residents based on “gender identity” rather than biological sex, and facility staff must use names and pronouns reflecting gender identity. While the law permits facilities to refuse opposite-sex room assignments based on secular clinical judgments — such as when the assignment would cause psychological harm to a roommate — it offers no equivalent accommodation based on religious judgment that the assignment would cause spiritual harm.

The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne welcome every patient to Rosary Hill Home. Catholic teaching holds that biological sex is God-given and cannot be morally changed, and that identifying a person by another sex is religiously prohibited lying. Consistent with that teaching, the facility houses patients in single-sex rooms based on biological sex, refers to patients by pronouns reflecting their biological sex, and performs “very personal acts of care such as painting women’s fingernails, combing their hair, changing them into fresh nightgowns, and arranging flowers in their rooms,” according to the complaint.

Acting Attorney General certified the case pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 2000h-2, which authorizes the United States to intervene in equal protection cases of general public importance.

Justice Department Intervenes in Lawsuit Challenging Evanston’s Race-Based Reparations Program

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division moved Tuesday to intervene in a federal lawsuit challenging Evanston, Illinois’ reparations program that distributes cash payments and housing assistance exclusively to Black residents and their descendants, alleging the city’s actions violate the Equal Protection Clause and the Fair Housing Act.

The city’s “Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program,” adopted in 2019, provides $25,000 in cash payments or housing assistance to Black persons who lived in Evanston as adults between 1919 and 1969, as well as their children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren. The city has distributed over $5 million to date and plans to distribute millions more as funds become available.

“Under the pretext of paying reparations for events more than 100 years ago, the City of Evanston has chosen to distribute millions of dollars in cash and housing benefits to people because of the color of their skin or the color of the skin of their parents, grandparents, or great grandparents,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “There are sound ways for a city to remedy past discrimination or direct resources to its most vulnerable citizens and neighborhoods. Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer. It is race discrimination, pure and simple. And it is illegal.”

According to the proposed complaint, the city has not identified any specific acts of discrimination that violated the constitution or a statute that the payments are intended to remedy. Nor does the city require any evidence that recipients or their ancestors experienced discrimination while living in the city. Race alone determines eligibility for the $25,000 payments or housing assistance.

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that government actions classifying citizens by race are presumptively unconstitutional,” said U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros for the Northern District of Illinois. “The Constitution demands that the government treat citizens as individuals, not as members of a racial class. Distributing public funds based on an individual’s ancestry or race divides the citizenry and establishes the very hierarchy the Equal Protection Clause was designed to dismantle.”

In 2024, descendants of persons who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 but were not Black filed a lawsuit, Flinn, et al. v. City of Evanston, challenging their exclusion from the program. The court denied the city’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit in March 2026. That same month, the United States opened an investigation into the program, but the city refused to cooperate, according to the Justice Department.

The United States now seeks to intervene in the lawsuit, alleging the program violates both the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fair Housing Act by offering and providing financial assistance for housing based on race.