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“This is an enormous relief to our clients and families across the state of Kansas,” said Harper Seldin, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Kansas’ LGBT & HIV Rights Project.

Civil liberties advocates, including the ACLU of Kansas, describe the law as targeting transgender people by forcing them into facilities that do not match their lived gender and by exposing them to new civil and criminal penalties.

In the lawsuit, filed last year by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and law firm Ballard Spahr, two transgender teenagers and their parents argue that the state’s ban violates the Kansas Constitution. They say denying gender-affirming treatments would cause their children permanent harm. The case has yet to go to trial on its merits.

Harper Seldin, senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT & HIV Rights Project, said the decision was “an enormous relief.” The ACLU and ACLU of Kansas represent the two teens and their parents, along with lawyers from the Philadelphia-based law firm Ballard Spahr.

In four Midwestern states, immigrants routinely won habeas corpus cases in federal courts. But the legal landscape is changing.

The ACLU and ACLU of Kansas filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs. “This is an enormous relief to our clients and families across the state of Kansas,” said Harper Seldin, Senior Staff Attorney for the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Rights Project. “The medical care unjustly banned by this law serves as the foundation of young transgender people’s entire lives and helps give them the future all young people deserve. Any decision about this medical care should be between families and their doctors, and today’s order from the court restores that fundamental principle.”

A judge granted a temporary injunction on Friday, blocking Kansas’s gender-affirming care ban and bringing “enormous relief” to trans youth and their families, according to ACLU attorney Harper Seldin.

In a ruling on Friday, the judge sided with the teens’ parents, who sued to halt the law, saying they had the right to make decisions regarding the health of their children, according to court documents and a statement from the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the plaintiffs. “This is an enormous relief to our clients and families across the state of Kansas,” ACLU attorney Harper Seldin said in a statement.

The ACLU is raising concerns about the abuse of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology in the wake of a disconcerting story out of Kansas. The technology, which has been described as a tool for mass surveillance, was used by police to track a man who had published an opinion piece critical of the police department in a local paper, and who was subsequently suspected of putting up anti-ICE posters around town a few days before the op-ed was published.