Trump administration sued for Stonewall Pride flag removal in New York

The Trump administration was sued Tuesday over the abrupt removal of the Pride rainbow flag last week from the Stonewall National Monument in New York City, at the site of the 1969 uprising that ignited the gay rights movement in the United States.

The lawsuit, filed by a group of LGBTQ+ advocates and a Greenwich Village community group, said the federal government claimed that Department of the Interior rules bar the flying of anything but the U.S. flags, DOI flags, and the POW/MIA flags in national parks.

“In fact, the opposite is true: The policies the government says require removing the Pride flag expressly permit the [National Park Service] to fly other flags that provide historical context to national monuments — which is precisely what the NPS official Pride flag did at Stonewall for many years,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan a day after a federal judge in Philadelphia ordered the National Park Service to restore an exhibit at Independence National Historical Park that contained information about the nine slaves who lived with President George Washington in the official presidential residence in Philadelphia in the 1790s.

That order will remain in effect pending the outcome of the city of Philadelphia’s lawsuit challenging the NPS’s removal of the exhibit in January.

The Pride flag had flown at the Stonewall National Monument since 2022 after a flagpole was installed there.

The monument is located across from the Stonewall Inn, where a July 1969 police raid of the then-underground gay bar was resisted by patrons, and followed by days of riots and protests.

“Before the 1960s, almost everything about living authentically as a lesbian, a bisexual person or a gay man was illegal,” the NPS page for the monument says. “The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 is a milestone in the quest for civil rights and provided momentum for a movement.

The new lawsuit in Manhattan federal court called the flag’s removal on Feb. 9 “a textbook example of an arbitrary and capricious act.”

“This was no careless mistake,” the suit says. “The government has not removed other historical flags at other national monuments, most notably Confederate flags. Meanwhile, the assault on Stonewall is the latest example in a long line of efforts by the Trump Administration to target the LGBTQ+ community for discrimination and opprobrium.”

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in a Feb. 10 post on X, said, “I am outraged by the removal of the Rainbow Pride Flag from Stonewall National Monument.”

“New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history,” Mamdani said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, on Sunday said he would introduce a bill to make “the Pride Flag a congressionally authorized symbol.”

Schumer blasted President Donald Trump for what he called an attack on the LGBTQ community by removing the flag.

“We will not allow Donald Trump to engineer a crusade against the LGBTQ community and rewrite history,” Schumer said in a post on X.

An Interior Department spokesperson, in a statement to CNBC when asked about the lawsuit, said, “Hundreds of families in New York City went without power during this year’s severe cold weather, people are being found dead on the streets, and trash has piled up so high it towers over city residents.”

“This is Mayor Mamdani, Senator Schumer and the congressional delegation’s New York City,” the spokesperson said. “It would be a better use of their time to get the trash buildup off city streets, ensure there are no more avoidable deaths, and work to keep the power on for the people of New York City.”

“This political pageantry shows how utterly incompetent and misaligned the New York City officials and New York’s congressional representatives are with the problems their city is facing.”