Texas

Following the state of Texas’s latest assurance to the U.S. Department of Justice that it will work towards fully complying with Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) in future years, Lambda Legal today sent a letter to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) PREA Ombudsman, urging investigations into several reports of sexual assault and abuse against LGBT people in Texas’s prison system.

After the shooting deaths of Dallas Police Officers and DART officers at a peaceful protest last night, Lambda Legal issued a statement from Roger Poindexter, South Central Regional Office Director and National Board of Directors Co-chair Tracey Guyot-Wallace, both based in Dallas.

Today, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that Texas and other states and officials have filed a lawsuit challenging the Obama Administration’s recently released guidance to schools across the country clarifying that federal law already prohibits discrimination against students based on gender identity.

Lambda Legal filed a friend-of-the-court brief in this case, arguing that landmark decisions vindicating the rights of LGBT people compel the conclusion that the constitutional right to choose to have an abortion finds protection under the Equal Protection Clause as well as the Due Process Clause of the federal Constitution.