PHOENIX — A Valley organization, dedicated to serving the LGBTQ+ community for the past 35 years, is now part of a new lawsuit filed in federal court late Thursday that challenges three of President Donald Trump's recent executive orders.
Prisma Community Care, formerly known as Southwest Center for HIV/AIDs, is a 501(c)(3) that provides primary care and mental health services to mostly underserved and marginalized communities across the Valley.
Prisma is now part of a new lawsuit, which includes five other nonprofits from around the nation, that was filed in federal court in San Francisco Thursday by Lamda Legal, which is representing the organizations and has filed three other lawsuits against President Trump's executive actions.
The lawsuit aims to pause Executive Orders 14168, 14151, and 14173.
“These executive orders pose an existential threat to transgender people and the organizations that advocate for them and provide them shelter, community, and support," said Jose Abrigo with Lamda Legal said in a statement to ABC15 Thursday. "Plaintiffs are HIV service organizations, community centers, and healthcare facilities whose work saves lives, in addition to a historical society whose mission is to record the stories of LGBTQ people. They join this lawsuit to fight the Trump administration’s attempt to erase transgender people from public life, and to continue the services they provide to marginalized communities, including communities of color and people living with HIV."
One of those organizations is Prisma Community Care. ABC15's Nick Ciletti spoke exclusively with the group's CEO, Jessyca Leach, shortly before the lawsuit was filed late Thursday.
"The idea that we have worked so hard as a community to demonstrate we just want to live. And to be told we shouldn’t even exist is just devastating," explains Leach. "I just want to be able to run my clinic, serve my community, and make sure that people have what they need, and they can live their best life."
Leach explains that after the orders were signed in late January, for about a week and a half, their grant funding was put on hold, which is used to reimburse Prisma for vital services like free HIV and STI testing, mental health services, and outreach to low-income individuals living with HIV.
Leach says it's creating concern and forcing the group to look elsewhere for funding so that services will not be interrupted.
Leach explains they've also been forced to not accept any new patients who are seeking gender-affirming care that are under the age of 18.
The White House claims President Trump issued the executive orders to follow the will of voters and said the DEI practices that were implemented by former President Joe Biden were "illegal," and needed to end.
Part of Executive Order 14173 says:
Illegal DEI and DEIA policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.
Count on ABC15 to follow up on this lawsuit and the others moving through the courts.
