A federal judge grappled for over an hour on Wednesday with an effort to force the Trump administration to provide American Sign Language interpreters at White House press briefings.
The case, brought by the National Association of the Deaf, alleges that, in failing to provide sufficient ASL interpretation, the White House is violating deaf Americans’ rights under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 from accessing “critical information in real time.”
US District Judge Amir Ali, one of former President Joe Biden’s final appointees, did not immediately issue a ruling, but he appeared sympathetic to the group’s arguments.
Without live ASL interpretations readily available at White House briefings, NAD attorney Ian Hoffman argued, deaf Americans are “deprived of their ability to participate in the democratic process.”
The Biden administration had staffed all of its press briefings with qualified ASL interpreters, but that policy was discontinued by the Trump White House earlier this year.
In court on Wednesday, the Justice Department argued that the current accessibility services offered by the administration — including live closed captions and written transcripts – are sufficient in providing the deaf community with “meaningful access” to White House information.
In briefings, the NAD had pushed back on this argument, asserting that ASL and English are distinct languages and that closed captioning is “especially inaccessible to the many thousands of deaf persons fluent only in ASL.”
Ali pressed Hedges about the utility of written transcriptions.
“How does it help to point to things that may not be adequate?” he said, asking why DOJ hadn’t presented evidence to show that written means were sufficiently able to inform the deaf community.
Hodges responded that the burden was on the plaintiffs to show that more thorough ASL translations were necessary and repeated her previous claim that the type of services provided should be at the discretion of the White House.
The National Association for the Deaf also took aim at the first Trump administration in 2020 for its failure to provide ASL interpretation during important Covid-19 briefings.
In that suit, a federal judge ordered the White House to provide in-frame videos of ASL interpreters during televised press events. In his ruling, US District Judge James Boasberg specifically clarified that written means such as transcripts and closed captions — the methods emphasized by the DOJ — “may constitute a reasonable accommodation under some circumstances, but not here.”
After Boasberg’s order, the first Trump White House began providing ASL interpreters for all pandemic-related press events. When Biden took office in 2021, his administration expanded accessibility programs and began staffing all press briefings with ASL interpreters. But on the first day of his second administration, Trump halted the use of all ASL interpreters at White House briefings, prompting the lawsuit filed in May.
The courtroom on Wednesday was flooded with members of the deaf community showing their support for the plaintiffs. ASL interpreters provided live translations throughout the duration of the nearly 90-minute hearing.