857: Museum of Now

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, and I am joined in the studio by my coworker Emmanuel Dzotsi.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Hey, Ira.

Ira Glass

Hey, there.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

So I have come into the studio today with this, actually. Let me just get it out of this bag really quickly. Hang on here.

[BAG RUSTLING]

[THUD]

Uh-- [CHUCKLES]

Ira Glass

So that is like a piece of rock about the size of a football, yellow on one side.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's a piece of concrete.

Ira Glass

Uh-huh.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

So there's a story behind this, which is a couple weeks ago, I went to this one street in Washington, DC, and on that street, there were-- I don't know-- maybe a dozen construction workers who were using all of this heavy machinery to rip out the words "Black Lives Matter," which had been painted on that street as part of this big mural they had done in 2020, right after the murder of George Floyd.

Ira Glass

Yeah, I actually saw that once. This is giant letters, like, 50 feet tall or something, two blocks long.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Yeah, it was, like, huge, and right by the White House. And what I was watching that day, as I was there, was the city just completely getting rid of it because of pressure they'd been under from the Trump administration. I thought that when I got there that there would be crowds or protests, but it was pretty empty. Most of the people that I saw just sort of walked past and kept it pushing, ignored what was going on.

But then I saw this one Black woman sort of stop and wave over to one of the lone Black guys working on the construction crew, just pointing at the ground.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

The piece she had was so big, she had to hold it with two hands. It was a piece of the letter T in the word "Matters." And the woman holding it, JC-- she's a politico, lives in DC-- she told me she was sitting at a cafe nearby when she saw someone else who had a piece and was like, oh, I want one of those.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

So I started seeing other people who were doing this, too, right? Just grabbing these pieces of the mural for future generations that did or didn't exist. There were these two women who were in town for work. One of them was scared that they were actually going to miss their flight because her friend was waiting so long for the construction workers to break off just the right piece of the mural as a souvenir.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

So I actually lived in DC when they first painted this street. And I got to say, at the time, when I first saw it, I totally understood how meaningful it was to some folks.

But personally, honestly, I just kind of rolled my eyes and laughed about it with the other Black people that I knew. It just felt kind of performative, just, like, one and the same with a lot of the stuff that was happening back then, right, like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and co. kneeling in kente cloth in the Capitol, all those black squares people were posting.

But now that I was actually here, seeing them tear this message out of the ground, it just-- I don't know-- I was just like, oh, right. It maybe didn't matter that much when it was first put in, but it definitely mattered now that it was being taken out.

Ira Glass

Yeah.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Across the street, I saw this older white guy who worked in urban design. He was so excited to have a piece of the thing.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

OK, so talking to this guy, it hit me, he's here to mark the end of something, which I realized, oh, we all were, right? I think it was clear to absolutely everybody there on that street that one era has ended, and we're in some very new moment right now.

And lots of us were just trying to puzzle that out in real-time, what this means. There were these two women that I met, Saraya and Yasmeen. Saraya was on the fence about taking a piece at all. She was just sort of like, why would I want a piece of something that never felt real?

Emmanuel Dzotsi

So as I was leaving the street that day, I just felt like, oh, right. The America that I know, the one I grew up in, it leaves the sign up, right? It says it believes in all of this stuff, that all of us are equal, that we all want to live in racial harmony, whatever. And then it just kind of does what it wants.

But what I saw, like the government going to these great lengths to tear up this street and to get every shred of the letters out, not even bothering to pay lip service anymore, I was like, that feels like a real shift. So yeah, that's how I ended up with this piece of concrete, which I guess is just going to live in my house forever.

Ira Glass

It's like you have a piece of the Berlin Wall or something.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

You know what? It does feel like that. It feels like this thing that I want to show everybody in my life. It's like it's a part of my own personal museum.

Ira Glass

Yes, a museum. One of the things that we've been talking about here on the staff, as you know, is it feels like there are so many things happening every day since President Trump took office, like federal agencies being gutted, or a judge ordering the White House to turn some planes around and them seeming to ignore the court order, or secret war planning being done on Signal on people's phones and shared with a random reporter.

There is so much happening so fast, and you feel like, oh, did that really happen? And you just-- I don't know. With our staff, we've been talking about how we just want to grab a hold of these things and just put them in a place where we can look at them together, just preserve them, like a museum, a museum of now.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

I mean, this feels rude to say on the radio, but I'm going to say it, which is you know that I'm not going to give you this for your museum, right? This is mine.

[LAUGHTER]

Ira Glass

Fine, because today on our show, we have other historical artifacts of this exact moment we are living through. As you'll hear the people in these stories over and over, they seem sort of dumbfounded at what they're suddenly seeing and dealing with in America today. We were, too. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. Today's show, "The Museum of Now." And let's take a little stroll, shall we, through the museum? Oh, watch out for the construction right there. There's some stuff. Yeah, we're just starting to build out our collection here. I guess we begin with this exhibit, a multimedia exhibit.

[SOOTHING MUSIC]

This is actually the hold music that people all over the country are hearing when they try to reach the Social Security Administration. The agency sends out payments to some 70 million people every month.

The agency says that it is getting way more calls than usual right now. Elon Musk and all the talk of rooting out fraud and kicking dead people off the rolls seem to be freaking out millions of senior citizens, so more of them are calling. Audits, by the way, show that lots of dead people are not getting checks. That is not a thing.

Wait times were long even before this, but right now, a fourth of the callers basically get a busy signal and have to try again. If you call and you do get put on hold, there is a callback option. But one of our coworkers decided to stay on the line to see how long it would take.

Ira Glass

Yeah, it was nowhere close to that. They finally picked up at one hour, 39 minutes.

Ira Glass

The worker who did finally pick up the phone, I will say, was super nice, very helpful.

Ira Glass

OK, next up, walk with me down the hallway here to this next exhibit. OK, stop right there. Here we have a short video. As you can see, it's playing on a loop. It was posted on X by the Secretary of Homeland Security, 8 seconds long. Security cam footage plays over and over.

And to help you understand what you're looking at, Aviva DeKornfeld has the story of the five days that led to this video for the woman who was in it. What happened in those five days caught this woman completely off guard because as far as she knew, or as we know now, what happened to her hadn't happened to anybody else at that point, just three weeks ago.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Day one, Thursday, 8:00 AM. Ranjani Srinivasan is not a morning person. She likes to start the day slowly, scroll on her phone in bed. She gets lots of panicked emails from her students. She's a teaching assistant. She's also a graduate student at Columbia University.

So day one, she was in bed when she saw an email, subject line, "Visa Revocation Notification." But the wording in the email was weird. It said she may be ineligible for her student visa, but also that it had been revoked. It seemed spammy.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Ranjani thought, hmm, OK, it seems to be real. But she's lived here a long time, nine years, and she's had a lot of visas. Things happen sometimes. So she emails the International Students and Scholars' Office-- they've helped her out with the visa stuff before-- and also the Dean of Student Affairs, and asked for help straightening this out.

Then she grabs her stuff and heads to the office she shares with the other PhDs, where she spends most of her time, to get some grading done. She had 60 student sketchbooks she needed to get through before Monday. That evening, she hears back from the International Students Office, who CC's the Dean of Student Affairs and tells her--

Aviva DeKornfeld

They tell her the next available appointment is in five days. Five days felt like too long to wait. The college was telling her that this would all get sorted out easily, but Ranjani has always been fastidious about her paperwork. She has an encrypted folder on her computer for all things visa-related.

She's been in the US since 2016 and knows almost all her entry and exit dates off the top of her head. She doesn't like loose ends, and she didn't like the idea of waiting five days. So she gets them to change the appointment to the next day.

Ranjani is from Chennai, in the south of India. And in 2016, she was awarded a Fulbright to get a master's in design at Harvard. And she was very excited to go to an American university.

Aviva DeKornfeld

She graduated with a master's from Harvard and then followed her intellectual hero to Columbia to get a PhD in urban planning. Her work focuses on the way that urbanization impacts the labor force. She often went back to India to do fieldwork.

But she settled happily in her life on campus. She's made lots of friends, including her roommate, another PhD student. The university randomly paired them together years ago, and they've since become close. Every year, the two of them take a family portrait with Ranjani's cat, Cricket, and send it around as a Christmas card.

Day two, Friday, 10:30 AM. Ranjani is in her bedroom. She hops on a Zoom call for her appointment with the International Students Office advisor, and starts explaining the situation with the weird email. Meanwhile, Ranjani's roommate is in the other room braiding her hair, getting ready for the day. Here's her roommate. To protect her privacy, we're not naming her.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Ranjani, in her bedroom, she doesn't hear the knock. She couldn't hear it over the reassurances from the advisor from the International Students Office.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The scary knocker knocks again. Ranjani's roommate told me she's a citizen and a woman of color who grew up poor, who's had a lot of interactions with the police, none of which she would describe as positive. But she knows what to do. She calls from inside the apartment, what is this about?

Aviva DeKornfeld

She goes to tell Ranjani what's happening.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The advisor eventually unmutes, looking relaxed again. And she tells Ranjani that she's safe. Just don't open the door for ICE. And then she gives her a list of immigration lawyers to contact.

Aviva DeKornfeld

They don't open the door, and the ICE officers eventually leave. Ranjani has had enough experience as an immigrant in this country to know that ICE is not supposed to show up at your door a day after your visa is revoked. This is not the way things typically work.

How it normally goes, you're granted a student visa, and the visa is the thing that allows you to enter the country. And once you're here, if you're a student, you can legally stay as long as you're enrolled in school, even if your visa is revoked. But if you stop attending school, then you have to leave the country.

This is what Ranjani was turning over in her head with ICE at the door. She still had her status as a student. She was still enrolled at Columbia. The advisor woman from Columbia on Zoom was telling her there should be no issue. But there was one, at her door. Ranjani thought, I have to get out of here. I need to hide.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Ranjani moves to her friend's apartment. She and her roommate decide that it's safer if her roommate doesn't know where she's going so that should ICE come back, she can truthfully say she doesn't know where Ranjani is.

But a few of Ranjani's other friends gather at the new location, and everyone starts calling immigration lawyers to try and figure out what to do. Meanwhile, the Dean of Student Affairs, who Ranjani first reached out to when she got the suspicious email from the consulate, calls her and says--

Aviva DeKornfeld

She wracks her brain for mistakes she might have made, looks back through all her immigration records, but she can't find anything.

Day three, Saturday, 6:20 PM. Ranjani is at her friend's place when her roommate calls her. She tells Ranjani ICE came back to the apartment. They didn't have a warrant, but they talked through the door. Her roommate recorded it.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Ranjani realizes the situation is not going to go away. The email was not spam, ICE showing up at her apartment not a fluke. She was being targeted. She'd never heard of this happening to anyone else. The rules, how things normally work, that was changing. But she didn't know it yet.

And then the same night her roommate tells her that ICE came back, ICE showed up at the apartment of another student, a Columbia graduate student named Mahmoud Khalil, who had just finished his degree in December. Mahmoud was coming home with his wife that night, unlocking his apartment door, when ICE appeared and detained him, took him away to a detention center in Louisiana. Mahmoud has a green card. His wife, Noor, is a citizen.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Ranjani did not know Mahmoud Khalil. She learned he was a leader of the pro-Palestine protests after he'd been detained. And here, a new thought occurs to her. She had liked some pro-Palestine posts on social media. She'd also signed a few open letters and gone to a couple peaceful protests.

And one night, coming home from a PhD picnic, she says she accidentally ran into a big protest on campus. It was chaotic. She says she got swept up by police officers, along with a bunch of other people. She received two summonses-- for blocking a sidewalk and refusing to disperse-- but they were both dismissed.

And now, Ranjani wondered, is that what all this is about? It seemed impossible she'd be targeted so personally for that. But what just happened to Mahmoud Khalil, that seemed impossible, too.

Day four, Sunday, 5:00 PM. Ranjani gets an email from Columbia saying that the Department of Homeland Security had now terminated her legal status, and the university was dis-enrolling her. She was no longer a student, no longer a teaching assistant.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Columbia University wouldn't speak to Ranjani's case in particular, but they sent us a statement that says, the university follows the law and, quote, "takes great care to ensure our legal compliance with all applicable rules and obligations so that our students can participate in the federal Student and Exchange Visitor Program."

Day five, Ranjani's lawyers told her she could fight this, but she'd likely be detained for some amount of time, no idea how long, though, as it would be a federal case, it would probably be at least a year while it wound its way through the courts. The only way to avoid detention, her lawyers told her, was voluntary departure. Ranjani thought, I have some friends and relatives in Canada. That's close by.

Aviva DeKornfeld

How American.

Those fears Ranjani had about what might have happened if she had stayed, well, two days after she left, at 9:40 PM--

Aviva DeKornfeld

This is Ranjani's roommate again. She grabs her phone to start recording.

Aviva DeKornfeld

This time, it's also different because they have Campus Safety with them, the Columbia campus police.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The ICE officers are all wearing masks with their comically large bulletproof vests. The Campus Safety guy, in his Columbia University lanyard, is just kind of standing around. If there is any question of Columbia working with ICE, it seems like it's answered here. Eventually, they all leave.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Ranjani has been in Canada for just over two weeks now. Columbia still hasn't reached out since ICE raided her apartment. She has no idea whether she'll be able to finish the degree she was a few months from completing, the degree she's worked towards for the better part of a decade.

And Ranjani is only now starting to get some information about what the government says she did wrong. The Department of Homeland Security has said that she failed to disclose the two summonses she received last spring, when she applied to renew her visa. Ranjani says that was a mistake. She didn't think to include them because they'd been dismissed.

And even though she's left the country, the government has not let up. She was eating lunch the other day when she got a message from her union rep saying, there's a video of you circulating online, tweeted out by the head of DHS, Kristi Noem. This is the video I thought was worthy of adding to our Museum of Now, 8 seconds of grainy security footage from LaGuardia Airport. In it, Ranjani is kind of jog-walking through the airport, pulling her carry-on bag behind her.

Alongside the video, Kristi Noem wrote, "It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence and terrorism, that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country." She celebrated Ranjani's, quote unquote, "self-deportation," as if running to safety was some kind of admission of guilt.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The day DHS released the video, they also put out a press release saying that Ranjani was involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization. Ranjani says that's absurd, that she never advocated for violence in any form, and that she was engaged in peaceful protest. I reached out to DHS. They didn't respond to our questions.

Ranjani has been personally targeted by one of the world's superpowers, a fact that feels so preposterous and surreal, it's impossible for her to wrap her head around, even now. So instead, she finds that her mind keeps landing on more familiar terrain. There's an image that keeps coming back to her. It's from day one, Thursday, March 6, the day she got that first spammy-seeming email.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Ranjani contains a kind of contradiction. She's someone who is deeply committed to the rules, and she tried to operate within those rules. Even after she left the country, she couldn't help but think, but I was in compliance. But also, some part of her sensed the rules had changed.

Ira Glass

Aviva DeKornfeld is a producer on our show.

Since Ranjani left the country, more students and faculty have been detained or deported by ICE. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked at a press conference just how many foreign students have had their visas revoked. He said at least 300.

Ira Glass

Coming up, somebody talks to a Trump administration official and holds their feet to the fire about incorrect facts that they're basing policy on in a way I just have never heard, not from reporters, not from other politicians, not from anybody. This official is simply not allowed to walk away from the conversation. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "Museum of Now." So many things around us seem to be changing so quickly since President Trump took office that it is hard to keep track. We thought it would be a good idea to create this museum where we could all pause for a minute, consider what is in front of us, what is happening.

And let's just head down the hallway here, OK, past the big map of the Gulf of America, and then past the pictures of President Trump on the lawn of the White House with a big, red Tesla-- a great product, he said, by the way, as good as it gets. OK, turn this corner.

OK, stop there. Here we are. This next exhibit, right in front of us, is a building. See the building? Yeah. We've moved an entire federal building into the museum. The building is the Elijah Barrett Prettyman US Courthouse. And it's here because it is one of the big, gladiatorial arenas of this moment in our country's history.

Tour the courtrooms in this building, and you will find it is full of dozens of cases filed against the Trump administration-- cases about fired federal workers, cases about DOGE and Elon Musk, cases about turning around planes full of Venezuelans, including that case where the judge ordered at least one plane to turn around mid-air, and it didn't happen. That courtroom is in this building.

One of our show's editors, Laura Starecheski, volunteered to drop by and observe what we all assumed, I have to say, would be a weedy federal court hearing here, expecting to be bored with the minutia of technical legal issues, or at least some of the time. And instead, Laura found action, drama, comedy. Here is Laura's story.

Laura Starecheski

I picked a bench on the right, plaintiff side, for my day in federal court. The case I was there to see was about an executive order Trump signed in the very first week of his second term, barring transgender people from serving in the military.

A group of transgender people were suing to block the executive order, claiming unconstitutional discrimination, decorated, elite, upstanding, patriotic, transgender service members, many of whom were there that day in court, sitting ramrod straight in the front row. Livelihoods and honor were at stake. This was my first federal court hearing, and I don't know what I was expecting exactly, but it wasn't this.

Laura Starecheski

Judge Ana C. Reyes. We had actors read the courtroom transcripts. I wasn't allowed to record there.

Laura Starecheski

In that other case, a bunch of inspectors general recently fired by President Trump asked Judge Reyes for a Temporary Restraining Order, a TRO, to get their jobs back. Judge Reyes did not grant the TRO. Reyes is a Biden appointee, but clearly, anybody expecting her to show knee jerk sympathy for fired federal officials was going to be disappointed. On X, some conservatives were praising her, but other people were mad.

Laura Starecheski

She's funny, I thought. But I'd come here to this courtroom to talk to the plaintiffs, to focus on them. That's what I thought the story was, not this judge or this hearing. How did this all look to the people maybe about to lose their careers and livelihoods? The plaintiffs had over 60 years of service between them, military careers going back generations, one called a passion and a family tradition, another called a deep responsibility.

The executive order was, quote, "a devastating rebuke, demoralizing." "If the ban stood, I would lose my way of life," one of the plaintiffs said in a declaration. These were people the military had spent millions of dollars to train. Some had been in combat, won medals. "Unassailable" is the word that comes to mind.

But the plaintiffs would sit silently through the 5-plus hours of this hearing, as it turned out. Judge Reyes would be the star of the show. In this moment, with Congress sidelined, or distracted, or something, it's all up to the judges, it seems, to determine if the Trump administration is following the Constitution, and if not, to compel them to do so.

And so I decided to watch Judge Reyes wrestle with the executive order before her. Judge Reyes is small, Latina, and just speaking for myself, intimidating. Almost immediately, once the hearing got going, her focus fell like the Eye of Sauron upon the government's lawyer, Jason Lynch. Lynch was there with two other lawyers for the Trump administration. Across the aisle from him were six lawyers on the plaintiffs' side.

Laura Starecheski

Lynch, bearded, substantial in his suit, talking so fast, the court reporter kept pleading with him to slow down, his job was to defend the executive order. Here's some of what it says. People with a, quote, "false gender identity" can't meet the standards for military service.

The order goes on to say, quote, "adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual's sex conflicts with the soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one's personal life. A man's assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member," end quote.

The implication here is that trans people are false, dishonorable, liars. I'm trans, and this kind of accusation isn't new, but I'll admit the words cut to the bone the first time I read them. And then there was this point from an earlier executive order that this one was based on, a blockbuster titled "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." I don't know about you, but I'd see that movie.

Anyway, the language in that executive order, if you haven't read it, goes like this-- "It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality." This was the first thing that Judge Reyes kind of drilled down on. She took it up with Lynch.

Laura Starecheski

EO is court speak for Executive Order.

Laura Starecheski

Lynch was standing in the well, the area in front of the judge, in which, while addressing her, he must ask even to turn his body and walk a few feet over to his desk to grab his laptop or a piece of paper with the executive order printed on it. A lawyer friend told me that the staging of all this is important. While standing in the well, the lawyers are subject to the judge's demands and requests.

The judge could be like, sit down, spin around-- whatever she wants. And the lawyer would need to do it. And while everyone is in the well together, the judge limits the discussion to what is important and true. So there is at least one magical three-dimensional space in America, sized about 300 square feet, where facts are privileged. I can tell you it's real because I saw it myself.

Laura Starecheski

She was deep in this material. I hadn't been able to tell up until this point if Reyes was leaning in a particular direction with this case. Now, I could see the things she loves-- science, rational thought, facts. Later, in this and other hearings, there would be Star Trek references, Beyoncé, side speech on Newtonian physics. For now, homework for the lawyers.

Laura Starecheski

This was the first big thwack Judge Reyes took at the validity of the executive order. Lynch didn't have a satisfying answer. Judge Reyes said he had to write up a brief on the biology of sex for her.

Around this time, I looked over at a large sketchpad on the lap of an older white man sitting next to me. He was sketching with a pencil some beautifully drawn geometric shapes. Next to those were lists of numbers. Next to the numbers, one row labeled "direct shots," one labeled "indirect shots."

Whoa. Was he keeping score, tracking how many points the judge landed and how many Lynch did? There were percentages. How long had he been following this case? There were layers of sophistication to observing a hearing like this that I couldn't have imagined.

I asked the guy later on a break. He told me he's retired. Court watching is his hobby. Comes here to the federal court building four or five times a week, just for fun. On the notepad, he was gaming out scenarios while he listened to the judge for his other hobby-- backgammon.

When an executive order gets challenged in court, there's this legal concept that gets applied, a basic test that has to pass. It's usually easy, like a limbo bar 10 feet in the air that you can just walk under. Does the order pass rational basis scrutiny? Meaning, is the government singling out this group for a legitimate reason? Is this order justified?

But with this executive order, it was hard to find a justification because none was offered. No military officials in uniform stepped up to testify. In fact, there were no complaints at all submitted to the court from anyone in the military that trans people disrupt unit cohesion or harm troop readiness, as the order claims. No real evidence, just the naked assertion that trans people are unfit to serve.

So without convincing evidence, Judge Reyes was left with the words in the order itself, and Jason Lynch standing in front of her to answer a very basic question-- is this order just demeaning and discriminatory in a common sense way?

Laura Starecheski

I don't have an answer. I don't have a view to express. I can't say. There were silver clock hands mounted up on the wood paneled wall above Lynch's side of the courtroom. They were stuck just after 9:00 AM. They never moved. And he repeated the same answers over and over and over.

Laura Starecheski

Animus-- here, a legal term, meaning roughly, hostility towards a specific group. Even if, say, a president doesn't like a certain category of people, the Constitution says the government can't treat them differently or worse than others without a sufficient reason. And if there is no sufficient reason, or any discernible reason for the executive order, the judge can conclude that it's simply discriminatory, and therefore unconstitutional.

Laura Starecheski

Lynch seemed to be in the awkward position of not having a counterargument, and also having no way to answer her questions without saying something that could hurt his case.

Laura Starecheski

I almost felt bad for Lynch, but he stayed the course, kept stonewalling, which is either the perfect joke for this spot, or the worst. Reyes paused, thought, tried a different tack.

Laura Starecheski

Lynch actually did go sit down. He left the microphone, awkwardly circumnavigated a large table on the government side, and sat with the other two lawyers. An invisible but collective cringe rippled across the courtroom.

Laura Starecheski

Lynch made his way around the table again and went back up to the microphone.

Laura Starecheski

This was as close as Lynch came, as far as I could tell, to conceding a point. It's fair for Judge Reyes to ask the question, to ask the government for one legitimate reason for banning transgender people from the military. Trump's Justice Department filed a complaint about Judge Reyes for this forced thought exercise about UVA Law School. They asked for an investigation, said she had tried to embarrass Jason Lynch.

Judge Reyes was open to hearing a reason why trans people should not serve in the military. Indeed, she asked for one, practically pleaded. I couldn't count the times over the course of this hearing and the ones that followed that Judge Reyes asked the government lawyers to offer any evidence, any testimony, any studies, any data that would support their case for the executive order. She gave them time. She asked for research and written briefs, anything or anyone.

Laura Starecheski

The government never produced any witnesses. No military person took the stand to argue for the executive order. Judge Reyes took a few weeks to rule. Meanwhile, an official policy came down from the Department of Defense. The policy instructed the military to identify trans people within 30 days, and required them to either leave on their own or be forced out.

So across the military, trans people started to get singled out by their commanders, first, slowly, in dribs and drabs, and then faster, as more and more got scooped up and sidelined in different ways. One plaintiff told me she had been yanked from her unit as a medic in a combat zone in the Middle East and put on a plane back to the US so the Army could start the process of discharging her.

Another, a congressional fellow in the Air Force serving at the Pentagon, was put on administrative leave and told to prepare to be separated. That's the military term for kicked out. A petty officer showed up for surgery at a Navy Medical Center in Virginia. He was pulled off a gurney after being given anesthesia, but before the surgeon began the procedure, and told to leave the hospital.

When Judge Reyes finally ruled, she wrote that she was blocking the military policy. She found that the policy and the executive order that it was based on violated equal protection rights in the Constitution.

She wrote, "The military ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext. Its language is unabashedly demeaning. Its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact." Her ruling said the military could not discharge transgender people just for being trans, and they have to bring anyone who's been put on leave back to active duty.

This week, the Trump administration appealed the case to a higher court. As I finish this story, it's unclear whether the military will be allowed to discharge transgender service members or whether Judge Reyes's ruling will stand.

If you'll permit me one small digression at this late stage, back in the courtroom, during the hearings, there was one other court watcher, an even older man, with jeans drooping off his skinny butt, dedicated, clearly irregular, not always coherent. At one point, apropos of nothing, he called out into the courtroom, referencing Brer Rabbit. They threw me into that briar patch, he said. Nothing worse than being thrown into a briar patch on a nice, warm, spring-like day.

I think it's fair to say that Trump's executive order, with its almost absurdly strong and cruel language, threw a lot of people into the briar patch-- plaintiffs, first and foremost, their families, other trans service members, lawyers, judges, me. It started a chain of events, and we might still be at the beginning. This case could take a while to wind its way through the courts, months, maybe years, making this the kind of situation that's apparently a little too easy to get into and very, very difficult to get out of.

Ira Glass

Laura Starecheski is one of the editors of our show. The actors were Veronica Cruz and Dave Shalansky.

Ira Glass

Well, our visit to the Museum of Now was produced and edited by Nancy Updike and Chana Joffe-Walt. They also sit on the museum's board and construction committee and say that if we need to visit again, they can pull some strings for us. They promise they're going to stay on the board, even if the president decides to make himself the chairman.

Other people put together today's show-- Phia Bennin, Michael Comite, Angela Gervasi, Cassie Howley, Valerie Kipnis, Seth Lind, Tobin Low, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Ike Sriskandarajah, Lilly Sullivan, Amelia Schonbek, Christopher Swetala, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Eli Hager, Tom Cartwright, Molly Mitchell, Liz Goss, Adam Cohen, Kathryn Bettis, Alex Guerrero, Sonja West, Kat-- no last name, you know you are-- Andrew Zitcer, Yowei Shaw, Karen Ortiz, Annika Barber, and Public Radio station KCRW in Los Angeles, where I've been recording this week. They have been so nice. Special thanks to Phillip Richards, Sarah Sweeney, and Jennifer Ferro.

A quick programming note-- we've been making these bonus episodes every two weeks for months now for our Life Partners. In the most recent one, a former producer named Alex Blumberg begins a little tour of This American Life stories to cover the news stuff. I have to say, it's like this weird time capsule of all kinds of feelings and events. If you want to hear those or hear the many, many non-news, very fun bonus episodes that we've made, go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, that man loves his prop comedy. Like, he'll take a red cape and Clark Kent glasses, put them on a slab of sidewalk, and proudly say--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.