Jonathan Stempel
Jan 8 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit seeking emergency relief from the U.S. government for Palestinian Americans and their families trapped in Gaza as they try to escape suffering caused by the war between Israel and Hamas.
Chief Judge Virginia Kendall of the U.S. District Court in Chicago said she lacks the authority and tools to evaluate the “delicate foreign policy decisions” of the executive branch of government while expressing sympathy for “the impossible position in which many plaintiffs find themselves.”
Nine Palestinian Americans, all of whom are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, filed the lawsuit in December 2024, alleging that the U.S. government violated their constitutional rights to equal protection by abandoning them in a war zone and failing to evacuate them as easily as other Americans.
They said destroyed homes, food shortages, poor medical care, mental anguish and other hardships had forced the government to have “mandatory, non-discretionary” powers to evacuate people from Gaza.
But the judge said she was ill-equipped to address how the evacuation would be coordinated with neighboring countries, how evacuees would be guided through the dangerous “red zone,” who would be eligible to evacuate, and how the nonexistent U.S. diplomatic presence in Gaza would complicate the process.
“Efforts to answer these and many similar questions in the comfort of the House of Representatives would not only be impossible, but would infringe upon the political branches’ constitutional mandate to determine when, how, and under what circumstances should be evacuated from a war zone,” Kendall wrote.
The judge also said available evidence showed the U.S. government had an evacuation plan in place and that the nine plaintiffs had either been evacuated or rejected offers to exclude immediate family members.
Attorneys for the Council on American-Islamic Relations advocacy group representing the plaintiffs had no immediate comment. The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to Israeli data, Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 people in an attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Since then, more than 71,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive on Gaza, according to the region’s health ministry.
The lawsuit targets former U.S. President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and continues to target their respective successors, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegers.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Nia Williams)
