Tania Nemer is one of dozens of immigration judges fired by the Trump administration this year.
But a new lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., suggests what happened to Nemer — and why — has the potential to scramble the federal workforce and upend foundational civil rights laws.
Nemer alleges that despite top performance reviews, she was dismissed from her job because of her gender, her status as a dual citizen of Lebanon and the fact that she once ran for municipal office in Ohio as a Democrat. Those reasons, she says, are all in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the First Amendment.
The government has responded by arguing that the president's power to oversee the executive branch under Article II of the U.S. Constitution essentially overrides that core civil rights law, Nemer's attorney said.
"This is a case in which the President of the United States has asserted a constitutional right to discriminate against federal employees," wrote her lawyer, Nathaniel Zelinsky, of the Washington Litigation Group. "If the government prevails in transforming the law, it will eviscerate the professional, non-partisan civil service as we know it."
The administration abruptly fired Nemer in early February, summoning her from the bench and escorting her out of a federal building in Cleveland. Both her supervisor and the chief immigration judge there told her they didn't know why she was being dismissed in the middle of her probationary period, the lawsuit said.