Palestinian-Americans sue Biden over failure to evacuate family members caught in Gaza
A group of Americans with family members stranded in Gaza sued President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Thursday, alleging they’ve deserted their relatives in the war-torn territory and violated their constitutional rights.
In a federal lawsuit filed in the Northern District of Illinois, the relatives say their family members have been deprived of “the normal and typical evacuation efforts the federal government extends to Americans who are not Palestinians.”
They say the feds have violated their 5th Amendment right, which guarantees equal protection.
“Plaintiffs are United States citizens, legal permanent residents, and immediate relatives of United States persons — stranded in Gaza and deprived of the standard efforts the United States government has always deployed to evacuate United States persons and their families from war zones,” the lawsuit read.
“Through this lawsuit, plaintiffs challenge the constitutionality of the federal government’s discriminatory practice of abandoning Americans of Palestinian national origin trapped in a war zone while promptly evacuating and acting to protect similarly situated Americans of different national origins from the same war zone,” the complaint stated.
A spokesperson from the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit was filed by the Council of American-Islamic Relations, which is helping to represent the plaintiffs.
They say that federal law establishes a duty to evacuate and that the feds moved quickly to evacuate Israelis. They point to other examples where the government mobilized quickly to rescue people in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sudan and Libya when conflicts broke out over the past several years.
The lawsuit asks the court to order the administration to launch emergency efforts to rescue their relatives.
According to Reuters, this is the second lawsuit launched this week over citizens stuck in Gaza. On Tuesday, Palestinian families sued over America’s military support for Israel.
At least 44,000 people have died in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
