This lawsuit seeks declaratory and injunctive relief from the Trump administration’s express targeting of plaintiffs for categorical, unjustified, and unconstitutional punishment by incarceration in conditions of “monstrosity.” Until December 23, 2024, plaintiffs were each serving federal death sentences. On that day, former President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 people on federal death row, including plaintiffs, to sentences of life imprisonment without parole. Then-President-elect Trump immediately expressed his fury at these acts of mercy. Less than 48 hours later, in his “Christmas Day message” on his social media platform, the president-elect specifically singled out the 37 people, telling them to “GO TO HELL!” This was one of several statements by President Trump and his campaign directing hostility at the commutations and the recipients of the commutations.

In the days and weeks after former President Biden’s commutations, BOP officials began working with the 37 individuals and their lawyers to reclassify and transfer them from the federal death row in U.S. Penitentiary (USP) Terre Haute, according to controlling statutory and policy requirements, known as the “redesignation” process. BOP officials recommended in the first instance that most plaintiffs be redesignated from their present facility to high security USPs or BOP health care facilities.

On January 20, 2025, in one of his first acts as president, Defendant Trump signed Executive Order 14164, “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” which singles out the 37 people whose death sentences were commuted, directing the attorney general to “evaluate the places of imprisonment and conditions of confinement for each of the 37 murderers whose Federal death sentences were commuted by President Biden, and the Attorney General shall take all lawful and appropriate action to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.” 

On February 5, 2025, in her first day in office as attorney general, Defendant Bondi directed BOP to immediately implement the president's order. EO 14164 and the Bondi Memo instituted a new procedure, replacing the usual BOP redesignation process. In defiance of the controlling statutes, regulations, and policies governing the BOP redesignation process, Defendants Bondi and Bove ordered BOP staff to engage in a new sham process that categorically predetermined that all plaintiffs—regardless of what the statutory BOP redesignation process had determined—will be incarcerated indefinitely in the most oppressive conditions in the entire federal prison system: USP Florence Administrative Maximum Facility (“ADX”), the only federal supermax prison, located in Florence, Colorado.

ADX is the most restrictive federal penitentiary in the country. Even in general population, people at ADX are imprisoned under uniquely oppressive conditions and isolated from nearly all human contact. They live alone in a concrete and steel cell smaller than a parking space. Their food is delivered through a slot in the door. They eat in their cells, within arm’s reach of their toilets. They shower in their cells, so that staff need not engage in even the limited contact required to escort them to showers on the range. Any religious or educational “programming” takes place in their cells, via closed circuit television. Group prayer, an essential tenet of some faiths, is strictly forbidden. Natural light comes through a single, narrow slit of a window, four inches wide, designed to ensure that nothing is visible except cement and sky. And people remain in these cells nearly all day, every day. If they get a chance to exercise, they do so alone, either in a small cage that staff refer to as a “dog run” or in an empty indoor room only slightly larger than their cells

Plaintiffs seek declaratory and injunctive relief to protect them from being transferred to ADX.