by Eric Lendrum
On Tuesday, a lawsuit was filed against Attorney General Merrick Garland by a group of parents in Michigan, with the intention of blocking his plans to use the Department of Justice (DOJ) to target them for protesting school board meetings, as reported by the New York Post.
The parents are from Saline, Michigan, and are represented by the American Freedom Law Center. The civil suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and seeks to protect the parents’ “fundamental right to freedom of speech, to direct the education of their children, and to be free from unlawful discrimination based upon their political and religious beliefs and views.”
The lawsuit asks for a “a preliminary and permanent injunction enjoining the recently announced policy of the Attorney General to use federal law enforcement resources to silence parents and other private citizens who publicly object to and oppose the divisive, harmful, immoral, and racist policies of the ‘progressive’ Left that are being implemented by school boards and school officials in public school districts throughout the United States.”
At the center of the lawsuit is Garland’s memo from October 4th, addressed to FBI Director Christopher Wray, which asks for the FBI’s help in investigating parents who protest at school board meetings; in the memo, Garland claims without evidence that these parents have threatened violence against school board members, and suggests prosecuting parents who participate in these protests.
Garland’s memo came after the National School Boards Association wrote a letter to the Biden Administration demanding that such parents be labeled as “domestic terrorists.”
“It is the natural, fundamental right of parents and legal guardians,” the lawsuit states, “to determine and direct the care, teaching, and education of their children…As parents and concerned citizens, Plaintiffs have a right to publicly object to the divisive, false, harmful, and immoral curricula and policies” being advanced by school boards such as the ones in Saline, Virginia’s Loudoun County, and elsewhere.
Another legal request had previously been made by America First Legal, the law firm founded by longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller, demanding that the DOJ’s watchdog investigate the memo.
“Targeting parents in local school boards is atrocious,” said Miller. “There’s no lawful basis for doing so. There’s no federal nexus that’s even connected to such an investigation. There’s not even a half-hearted attempt to suggest this was done for a legitimate law enforcement purpose.”
Garland’s declaration came after months of a consistent trend of parents protesting at school board meetings over numerous far-left policies and controversial topics being forced onto their children in the classrooms. The most serious concerns involve the teaching of Critical Race Theory, the debunked far-left claim that all White people are automatically racist and that America is an inherently racist nation, as well as policies that allow allegedly “transgender” students to use restrooms and other facilities of their choice.
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Eric Lendrum reports for American Greatness.
