(10 Mar 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
New York – 26 February 2025
1. EEOC Judge Karen Ortiz walking
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Judge Karen Ortiz, United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:
"We got directives, meaning the judges and attorneys in our office from our supervisors to hold back cases where LGBTQ folks were alleging discrimination that resulted from receiving email directives from my supervisor to do that, to flag these cases, to hold back on them until they were reviewed by headquarters, which we had never been asked to do before.”
3. Various of Ortiz on computer
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Judge Karen Ortiz, United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:
"I was waiting to see if management would step up and say, at least hold off on doing this until we explore the legality of it. But no one said anything.”
5. Various of Ortiz on computer
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Judge Karen Ortiz, United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:
"I then received an email on a Sunday, another fork in the road email I was actually traveling and that kind of pushed me over the edge. And I started thinking about what would I call an email that I send out within the agency."
7. Karen Ortiz reading her email UPSOUND: "A spoon is better than a fork. Good morning Andrea. Apparently, no one in leadership is willing to ring the alarm bells, so it falls upon one of us to do it. If you want to continue following the illegal and unethical orders of our president and the unelected leader of DOGE. If, upon reflection, you feel like now would be a good time to take a vacation and resign from your position, please reply all to this email and put I’d like to occupy Mars in the subject line. We will take this as notification that you are resigning your position as Acting Chair. P.S. Happy Black History Month. Sincerely, Karen M Ortiz."
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Judge Karen Ortiz, United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:
"This isn’t a partisan issue for me. We take complaints from any federal employee that follow that files them, any employee that files them regardless of their political affiliation or what the basis of their claim is. So it’s not about Trump. It’s about what’s right."
9. Ortiz walking
STORYLINE:
To billionaire Elon Musk and his cost-cutting team at the Department of Government Efficiency, Karen Ortiz may just be one of many faceless bureaucrats. But to her colleagues, she has become somewhat of a hero.
Ortiz is an administrative judge at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — the federal agency that enforces U.S. workplace anti-discrimination laws and that has undergone tumultuous change since President Donald Trump took office. Like millions of other federal employees, Ortiz on Jan. 28 opened an ominous email titled “Fork in the Road" giving them the option to resign from their positions.
Her alarm only grew when her supervisor directed administrative judges in her New York district office to pause all their current LGBTQ+ cases and send them in for review in order to comply with Trump’s executive order on gender identity, which decreed that there are only two “immutable” sexes: male and female.
Ortiz decried management’s lack of action in response to the directive, and called upon some 185 colleagues in an email to “resist” complying with “illegal mandates.” But that email was “mysteriously” deleted, she said.
Ortiz insists her objections are not because of politics.
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