According to the students, educators, and organizations bringing the case, SB 99 has effectively become a “Don’t Say Gay” bill that has further stigmatized LGBTQ+ youth, who already face high rates of bullying and harassment. In a time of increased hostility towards LGBTQ+ students, this case aims to ensure that all students can go to school without feeling that their identity is a taboo subject.
Another one of our grantees, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, is trying to protect a nonprofit’s right to provide food, clothing, and temporary shelter to immigrants who have just crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Earlier this year, the Texas Attorney General demanded that Annunciation House, a nonprofit associated with the Catholic diocese in El Paso, hand over all of its documents—including identifying information—of everyone it had ever helped. When Annunciation House asked for more time to review this request, Texas attempted to revoke the organization’s nonprofit status, which would force it to shut down.
Annunciation House serves hundreds of asylum-seekers and refugees, including many families, every day. Its closure would cause immeasurable harm to these communities and could also endanger the ability of other nonprofits and faith-based organizations to help people in need. In an exciting update to this case, a district court judge recently dismissed Texas’s efforts to shut down Annunciation House. However, the Texas Attorney General has appealed this decision, which means that the litigation is still ongoing.
Defending and Expanding Indigenous Sovereignty
Two grantees are bringing lawsuits related to the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline on the unceded land of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation in Canada.
The Gidimt’en and Likhsilyu Clans of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, represented by the public interest law firm Chantler & Company, are suing the Canadian police and the pipeline company for surveilling, intimidating, and violently harassing Indigenous land defenders resisting the pipeline. In 2018, the land defenders established a checkpoint near the pipeline construction site to observe and protest its construction. In the years since, police officers have arrested with brutal force the land defenders, community elders, journalists, and legal observers at the checkpoint.
