Tag: lawsuits

West Virginia sues Apple, saying iCloud distributed ‘child porn’

West Virginia’s attorney general sued Apple (AAPL.O) on Thursday, accusing the iPhone maker of allowing its iCloud service to become what the company’s own internal communications called the “greatest platform for distributing child porn.”

Attorney General JB McCuskey, a Republican, accused Apple of prioritizing user privacy over child safety. His office called the case the first of its kind by a government agency over the distribution of child sexual abuse material on Apple’s data storage platform.

“These images are a permanent record of a child’s trauma, and that child is revictimized every time the material is shared or viewed,” McCuskey said in the statement.

Apple in a statement said it has implemented features that prevent children from uploading or receiving nude images and was “innovating every day to combat ever-evolving threats and maintain the safest, most trusted platform for kids.”

“All of our industry-leading parental controls and features, like Communication Safety — which automatically intervenes on kids’ devices when nudity is detected in Messages, shared Photos, AirDrop and even live FaceTime calls — are designed with the safety, security, and privacy of our users at their core,” Apple said.

Apple on Thursday said it plans to roll out a feature in the coming weeks that allows users in the U.S. to flag inappropriate content such as nudity directly to Apple via a “Report to Apple” feature. This is already available in Australia and the United Kingdom. Apple said the expansion was previously planned and not in response to West Virginia’s lawsuit.

The U.S. has seen a growing national reckoning over how smartphones and social media harm children. So far, the wave of litigation and public pressure has mostly targeted companies like Meta, Snap, and Google’s YouTube, with Apple largely insulated from scrutiny.

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Vietnam War veterans sue to block Trump’s proposed ‘Triumphal Arch’ monument in DC

A group of Vietnam War veterans has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block President Donald Trump’s proposed “Independence Arch,” a massive monument planned for Memorial Circle between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, argues the 250-foot structure would obstruct the historic line of sight between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House at Arlington National Cemetery.

The plaintiffs say that the view was intentionally designed to symbolize national unity following the Civil War and has remained unobstructed for nearly a century.

According to the complaint, the proposed arch would be “as tall as 250 feet,” more than double the height of the Lincoln Memorial, and would be positioned directly on the ceremonial axis connecting the two memorials.

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Texas Sues Drone Maker Anzu Over Alleged Ties to CCP

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing drone-maker Anzu Robotics, alleging that the U.S.-based company misled consumers and concealed its ties with the Chinese communist regime.

Paxton announced the lawsuit on Feb. 19, accusing the Texas-based startup of rebranding products sourced from Chinese drone giant Da Jiang Innovations, commonly known as DJI.

Founded in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen in 2006, DJI has been flagged by U.S. regulators as a security risk because of its ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The U.S. Commerce Department added DJI to its export control list in 2020 for aiding the CCP’s human rights abuses. The Treasury banned U.S.-based individuals from trading DJI shares the following year because of similar concerns. The Pentagon blacklisted DJI as a Chinese military company in 2022, noting that the Chinese regime requires all Chinese companies to allow it to use them as part of its military-civil fusion strategy.

In the lawsuit, Paxton accused Anzu of making false and misleading representations to Texans about its business relationship with DJI, data-sharing practices, and software development.

Anzu markets itself as an American-owned, made-in-Malaysia alternative, but much of its drone technology is licensed from DJI, which receives payments for every drone that Anzu orders, the complaint alleges.

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California Planning to Sue Trump Admin Over Revised Child Vaccine Guidelines, Bonta Says

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said on Feb. 17 that the state plans to take legal action against the Trump administration over the recent modifications to the childhood vaccine schedule.

The CDC on Jan. 5, with backing from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., narrowed the number of vaccines routinely recommended by the childhood schedule.

Bonta told Reuters in an interview that he has mobilized his team to identify the necessary details for a possible complaint against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), including jurisdiction and legal grounds for pursuing the lawsuit.

“I like the facts. I like science. I don’t want to give any airtime to his—I mean, just conspiracy [expletive],” Bonta told the news agency, referring to Kennedy’s stance on vaccines.

Bonta did not specify when the state might file or whether it would be a multistate filing. Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, who also spoke to Reuters, indicated his state may join California in the filing.

The Epoch Times reached out to HHS for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

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Teachers Union and School Districts SUE Trump Administration Over ICE

Two Minnesota school districts and the state’s largest teachers union have filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration, challenging a new immigration enforcement policy that allows federal agents to operate at or near schools and bus stops. 

The complaint, filed February 4 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, names the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Kristi Noem, and subagencies including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as defendants.

The plaintiffs—Fridley Public Schools, Duluth Public Schools, and Education Minnesota—argue that the administration’s decision to rescind a decades-old “sensitive locations” policy has disrupted school operations across the Twin Cities region. 

They contend that enforcement activity near school grounds has reduced attendance, forced districts to expand remote learning, and diverted administrative resources.

The lawsuit seeks to reinstate restrictions that previously limited immigration enforcement at schools absent exigent circumstances or supervisory approval.

The policy change at the center of the dispute occurred in January 2025, when DHS formally revoked prior guidance that discouraged immigration arrests at schools, churches, and similar locations.

The updated directive replaced categorical restrictions with officer discretion, stating that federal agents would rely on “common sense” rather than bright-line prohibitions. 

DHS defended the move as necessary to prevent criminals from exploiting geographic safe havens to avoid apprehension.

The litigation follows “Operation Metro Surge,” a high-profile federal enforcement initiative in the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, the operation deployed thousands of agents to address what officials described as a backlog of criminal and fraud-related investigations. 

Just days after the lawsuit, thousands of high school students across the country—including students in several Minnesota districts involved in the litigation—staged walkouts to protest ICE and call for the agency’s abolition.

Videos circulated rapidly on social media, showing coordinated demonstrations framed as acts of civic resistance. 

In some districts, students who had walked out to protest immigration enforcement are now enrolled in systems suing the very agency responsible for carrying it out.

Immigration law is written by Congress and enforced by the executive branch. The prior “sensitive locations” guidance was an internal policy, not a statute.

Its rescission does not eliminate constitutional protections, judicial warrants, or due process. Instead, it restores operational flexibility to agents tasked with enforcing federal law.

Democrats maintain that enforcement presence near schools generates fear that undermines educational stability. District officials point to funding formulas tied to attendance and argue that declines in enrollment threaten budgets.

The complaint alleges that DHS failed to provide sufficient justification for abandoning the prior policy and violated administrative rulemaking procedures under the Administrative Procedure Act.

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Florida spent $4 million in opiate settlement to defeat marijuana legalization

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration spent $4 million in cash from a national opiate crisis settlement to defeat a 2024 adult-use marijuana legalization initiative.

DeSantis officials never told the statewide advisory board – set up to determine how to spend that money – that it would go toward an anti-cannabis political campaign, the Orlando Sentinel reported on Sunday.

In all, Florida spent $35 million on television ads and other campaign efforts to defeat Amendment 3, an adult-use legalization constitutional amendment that also had an endorsement from Donald Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee, the Sentinel reported.

The measure had 56% voter support but needed 60% to pass.

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A Tiny Alabama Town Ran an Outrageous Speed Trap. Now It Will Pay $1.5 Million To Settle a Lawsuit.

The hamlet of Brookside, Alabama, has agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit three years after local news investigations revealed that it was running a predatory speed trap.

The Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that sued Brookside in 2022 on behalf of motorists who said they were framed and swindled by the town, announced on Monday that it had reached a settlement agreement that would require substantial transparency and policing reforms, in addition to payments to the class members.

Brookside became a national news story in 2022 after the Birmingham News reported that the small town’s unusually large police force was bankrolling the city budget by fining people traveling through and towing their cars under what motorists claimed were fabricated charges.

It was one of the worst cases of profit-motivated policing in recent memory: The news investigation found that Brookside, a place with no traffic lights and one commercial property, a Dollar General store, “collected $487 in fines and forfeitures for every man, woman and child.” By 2020, two years after Brookside expanded its police force from one officer to nine and began aggressively pursuing traffic enforcement, income from fines and forfeitures comprised 49 percent of the town’s budget. Motorists alleged that they were getting pulled over for fake traffic violations, slapped with bogus charges, then forced to pay thousands in fines and towing fees after being convicted in Brookside’s municipal court.

The investigations led to the resignation of the Brookside police chief, a Pulitzer Prize for the reporters, and a class action lawsuit filed by the Institute for Justice.

“Police are supposed to protect and serve, not ticket and collect,” Chekeithia Grant, one of the named plaintiffs in the case, said in an Institute for Justice press release Monday. “When that gets flipped around, people suffer. We brought this case to remind Brookside of that, and to get the town on the right track. This settlement should do that. And it should be a warning to other towns.”

According to the lawsuit, Grant and her daughter were both arrested by Brookside police following a traffic stop and falsely charged with possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, obstruction of government operations, and resisting arrest. Both were convicted in the Brookside Municipal Court, but town prosecutors agreed to dismiss all the charges after the two women appealed to a county court. But by then, they had already paid roughly $2,000 in fines and fees to Brookside.

Brookside’s racket was so outrageous that the Justice Department filed a “statement of interest” in support of the Institute for Justice’s lawsuit, noting the perverse profit incentives that such schemes create:

Judges should not profit from their decisions in cases. Nor should funding for prosecutors or police officers depend substantially on unnecessarily aggressive law enforcement aimed at generating income through fines and fees. Criminal justice systems tainted by these unreasonable incentives stand to punish the poor for their poverty and put law enforcement at odds with the communities they are meant to serve.

However, Brookside was just a particularly odious example of the classic American speed-trap town, a municipality that survives by latching onto a nearby highway and gorging itself, like a bloated tick, on traffic enforcement revenue.

States have often responded to negative publicity from speed-trap towns with legislative reforms, and Alabama was no different. A few months after Brookside’s practices were exposed, the Alabama state legislature passed a bill capping the revenue municipalities can keep from fines to just 10 percent of their general operating budgets.

In addition to the $1.5 million payout to the lawsuit class, the proposed settlement will require Brookside to end many of the financial incentives tied to its traffic enforcement, such as repealing its fee to retrieve towed cars. The Brookside Police Department would also stay off the nearby interstate for the next 10 years, except for emergency response, and there would be 30 years of strict caps on how much revenue the town could keep from policing and code enforcement.

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Is This the End of Transgender Hysteria?

A few years ago, things looked pretty bleak for skeptics of transgenderism — those of us who have great compassion for those afflicted by what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders long referred to as the “disorder” of gender dysphoria, but who refuse to accept the lie that a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man.

During the 2020 presidential race, then-candidate Joe Biden tweeted, “Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.” As president in 2023, Biden followed up by stating, “Transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know.” That same year, the transgender fad achieved unprecedented reach among impressionable youngsters: While Gallup reported that (an already-high) 7 percent of all Americans identified as LGBTQ, that number soared to 20 percent of all Gen Z — and as high as 38 percent on some elite Ivy League campuses. 

But the social craze began to face setbacks. In the UK, the National Health Service’s Cass Review cast substantial doubt on the underlying scientific evidence purporting to support “gender-affirming care.” Enterprising investigative journalists, such as Christopher F. Rufo, began to expose rampant ethical concerns with America’s gender clinics. Polling began to reflect broader concerns with the transgender narrative on issues such as women’s athletic competition. President Donald Trump, intuiting that law can shape culture just as culture can shape law, signed numerous transgender-related executive orders in the first few weeks of his second term.

Now, it seems the dam may be breaking.

In a landmark legal judgment on Jan. 30, a 22-year-old biological woman named Fox Varian was awarded $2 million in the Westchester County Supreme Court. Varian, a “detransitioner,” had an irreversible double mastectomy when she was 16 years old. The New York court held her psychologist and surgeon liable for $1.6 million for past and future suffering, and an additional $400,00 for any future medical expenses. Varian, whose mother initially opposed the operation but consented following the surgeon’s “emphatic” insistence, became deeply depressed following the procedure. Now, she has become the first “detransitioner” to win a medical malpractice lawsuit at trial.

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Black mother ruined life of white boy by lying that he was racist bully who forced her son to drink urine, netting family $120k on GoFundMe

A black mother who said her son was forced to drink urine by a racist bully was ordered to pay millions in damages for intentionally smearing his name.

SeMarion Humphrey, an eighth grader at Haggard Middle School at the time, was allegedly forced to drink urine and was racially abused during a sleepover with a group of classmates in February 2021, triggering a police investigation.  

Humphrey’s mother, Summer Smith, claimed her son was taunted and called the N-word, in addition to a number of homophobic slurs, and that some of the boys shot him with a BB gun during the sleepover in Plano, Texas. 

After a clip from the sleepover went viral, Smith, and her attorney Kim Cole, raised nearly $120,000 on GoFundMe to help pay for his ‘therapy and private schooling.’

Humphrey’s mom targeted Asher Vann – a white student who was hosting the sleepover – and ran his name through the mud in a bid to get ‘justice’ for her son. 

Smith posted on her public social media for Vann to be expelled from school, causing him to receive death threats and fear for his life.

Now five years later, a diverse Texas jury ruled that Smith and Cole must pay $3.2 million in damages to Vann for the smear campaign they triggered.

Vann, now 18, was never charged for the alleged racial bullying – and when the claims were brought up in court, police and teachers testified that the kids were simply playing stupid pranks on one another.

Vann’s lawsuit came to civil trial in October 2025, where the jury was ruled that Smith and Cole exploited the incident to rake in thousands of dollars in donations. 

According to records obtained by the Free Beacon, Smith put a mere $1,000 of the staggering GoFundMe pot toward her son’s assets – pocketing the rest for herself.

The account statements reveal the remaining funds were spent on luxuries, including a designer dog, dining and travel, cell phones and car payments.

‘I was getting death threats from thousands of people on social media,’ Vann told Free Beacon, who is now a freshman in college.

‘People leaked my address and my name. During one of the protests, they walked all the way to my house and threw bricks through my house.’

Vann and his family sued Smith and Cole for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress, which the jury ruled in Vann’s favor.

‘It was scary. These were adults, and I was in middle school at the time. Full-grown adults were rushing my house and causing harm to it,’ Vann told the outlet.

‘What if I was home and they saw me? They could have ripped me from my home and beaten me. It was very scary.’

Criminal charges were initially launched against the boys because of the BB gun claims, but Plano Police Department Officer Patricia McClure testified that there wasn’t enough probable cause for the charges, the outlet reported.

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Lawsuit Challenges National Park Service Ban on Cash Payments

Across the United States, cash is quietly disappearing from places that once took it without question. Government agencies and private businesses now route even the smallest transactions through digital networks that record who paid, when, and where.

This has created a growing dependence on card processors and mobile payment companies that profit from every exchange and hold the power to deny or suspend access.

That dependence has now reached federal land. The National Park Service has begun refusing cash at dozens of parks and historic sites, forcing visitors to use electronic payment systems to enter public property.

A lawsuit challenging that policy argues that by excluding physical currency, the agency is violating federal law and pushing citizens into a digital system that tracks their movements and spending.

Attorney Ray Flores has filed an appeal with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, seeking to overturn the dismissal of a lawsuit against the National Park Service (NPS) for refusing to accept cash at dozens of federal sites.

We obtained a copy of the filing for you here.

The case, backed by Children’s Health Defense, centers on whether a federal agency can legally decline the very currency the government itself issues.

At issue is the NPS policy that bars visitors from paying park entrance fees with cash. The appeal argues that the agency has violated both the Administrative Procedure Act and the Legal Tender Statute, which defines US coins and bills as “legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues.”

Flores wrote that the district court’s earlier decision effectively “demonetized the U.S. Dollar on federal property without justification.”

His brief asks the appeals court to declare the policy unlawful or send the case back for trial.

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