The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is moving to fire an administrative judge who publicly challenged a Trump administration directive that paused discrimination investigations involving transgender people, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Karen Ortiz, who has served as a judge with the EEOC for over six years, was placed on administrative paid leave Wednesday and told that the agency is seeking her removal for “conduct unbecoming of a federal employee,” and for violating its email policy, according to letters reviewed by the Times.
Ortiz has 15 days to respond to the accusations and says she plans to fight them, but has no regrets.
“These are quite literally trumped-up charges,” she told the Times. “I stand behind my actions, which support the rule of law and the trans community.”
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“Ms. Ortiz gained national attention in February when someone leaked her email to the commission’s acting chairwoman, Andrea Lucas, calling on her to resign,” according to the Times report. “Ms. Ortiz accused Ms. Lucas of following the ‘illegal and unethical orders of our president’ and violating the Constitution.”
She included about 1,000 of her colleagues in the email, where she said she would “not compromise my ethics and my duty to uphold the law.”
In response, Ortiz’s email access was revoked, and she was reprimanded for not seeking approval before sending a mass communication – an EEOC policy requirement, according to the report. But Ortiz continued to fire off additional emails, including one that linked to the 1985 Tears for Fears hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World," which was deemed " “profoundly unprofessional" by her supervisor.
The EEOC action came weeks after Trump “mentioned her — though not by name — in an executive order on April 18 that aimed to make it easier to fire government workers who ‘oppose presidential policies,’” the Times said.
