A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit seeking to force the US government to carry out emergency rescues of Palestinian Arab Americans and their relatives trapped in Gaza amid the war between Israel and Hamas, Reuters reported.
Chief Judge Virginia Kendall of the US District Court in Chicago ruled that she lacked the authority and tools to evaluate “delicate foreign policy decisions" that belong to the Executive Branch, while noting her sympathy for “the impossible positions in which many of the plaintiffs have found themselves."
Nine Palestinian Arab Americans - all US citizens or lawful permanent residents - filed the lawsuit in December 2024, accusing the US government of violating their constitutional right to equal protection by leaving them in a war zone and failing to evacuate them as readily as other Americans.
They argued that destroyed homes, food shortages, inadequate medical care, mental anguish and other hardships created a “mandatory, non-discretionary duty" for the government to evacuate people from Gaza.
But Kendall said she was not equipped to determine how to coordinate an evacuation with neighboring countries, how to move evacuees through dangerous “red zones," who qualifies for evacuation, or how the lack of a US diplomatic presence in Gaza would affect the process.
Kendall also noted that available evidence showed the US government had developed an evacuation plan, and that the nine plaintiffs had either already been evacuated or declined offers that did not include immediate family members.
Lawyers from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which represents the plaintiffs, had no immediate comment. The US Department of State also did not immediately respond.
The lawsuit was filed against former US President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and continued against their successors Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth.