The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Department of Defense’s education agency on Tuesday, arguing that the removal of books in response to Trump administration orders infringed on the First Amendment rights of students.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, centers on a school system for children of military families run by the Defense Department.

Lawsuit Cites First Amendment Concerns

The school system has faced pushback and student walkouts in response to a number of changes under the Trump administration, including the pausing of student affinity clubs focused on race and gender and the removal of Pride decorations at some schools.

The schools, which routinely produce some of the top reading and math scores in the country, educate more than 67,000 students in preschool through high school on military bases in the United States and abroad.

Because Defense Department schools are run by the federal government, they have been uniquely subject to President Donald Trump’s executive orders on education, such as an order “ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling” that criticized teaching about concepts such as white privilege and rejected policies supporting transgender students’ pronouns and bathrooms, for example.

Executive Orders Prompt Changes

Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, also called for an end to cultural awareness months in the military, such as those for Black history or women’s history, a change that applied to its schools.

“We think of the changes in these schools as the canary in the proverbial coal mine for the changes this administration would like to see throughout the country,” said Emerson Sykes, a lawyer with the ACLU.

Although military members give up certain rights while on the job, he said, their children are civilians. “These are American kids, like any other American kids, and these are public schools,” Sykes said.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of six families whose children attend schools in Virginia, Kentucky, Italy and Japan.

Specific Books and Topics Removed

It asserts that Defense Department schools removed books touching on race and gender identity not because of their educational value, but “simply because a new presidential administration finds certain viewpoints on those topics to be politically incorrect.”

According to the lawsuit, removed books included the classic novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee; “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini; “Both Sides Now,” a book about a transgender teen participating in a national debate competition; and “A Queer History of the United States,” about LGBTQ+ figures throughout American history.

A spokesperson for Department of Defense schools said he could not comment on the lawsuit.

Officials have previously said that they were making changes in compliance with the orders from the Trump administration and Hegseth, who was also named in the lawsuit.

The Pentagon declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

The lawsuit also argues that students were denied the opportunity to learn about Black history and the contributions of Black Americans after the cancellation of Black History Month. And it contends that students are being denied access to certain topics that they need to learn to navigate the world and do well on future tests.

According to the lawsuit, Department of Defense schools have removed certain chapters from health education textbooks, including those on sexually transmitted diseases, sexual harassment and the human reproductive system. And students enrolled in Advanced Placement psychology are no longer being taught certain material on gender and sex, which may appear on the Advanced Placement exam, the lawsuit said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Sarah Mervosh/Kendrick Brinson
c. 2025 The New York Times Company