Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fikre

Yonas Fikre and the No Fly List 

The FBI placed American citizen Yonas Fikre on the No Fly List, a government database of people who are prohibited from flying through U.S. airspace. According to Fikre, FBI agents questioned him about his mosque in Oregon and offered to remove him from the list if he agreed to become a confidential government informant regarding the mosque, which he declined. The government denied Fikre’s request to take him off the list, and Fikre filed a federal lawsuit arguing that he was being deprived of his right to free travel based on his religious affiliation. 

The FBI backtracks 

After Fikre filed suit, the FBI removed him from the No Fly List. A federal district court then accepted the FBI’s motion to dismiss his case as “moot,” meaning that the court saw the harm to Fikre as no longer ongoing. Fikre appealed that decision to the Ninth Circuit, arguing that his rights were still at stake because the FBI could put him back on the No Fly List at any time. The Ninth Circuit sided with Fikre and reversed the lower court’s decision. In 2023, the government asked the Supreme Court to hear the case and it agreed. 

At the Supreme Court, Fikre argued that his case should not be dismissed because the government offered no assurance that it would not put him back on the No Fly List. The FBI asserted that the Court should trust the government’s word because it had testified that it would not return Fikre to the List “based on currently available information.” 

Becket argues against special treatment for government 

In November of 2023, Becket filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case in support of neither party. The brief explains that governments should have to meet a high standard to prove that a legal dispute is no longer live when it reverses policies or activities at issue in a case. Courts should hold governments to the same high standard as private citizens in determining whether their voluntary change in conduct means a case should be dismissed as “moot”.  

Granting governments special treatment would be especially harmful to religious Americans. Federal, state, and local governments frequently make policy changes after being taken to court for violating religious liberty protections to avoid being held accountable. For example, Becket has challenged several versions of the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate in which government officials have used this tactic to attempt to evade religious liberty claims. There is no reason for court to give governments a do-over when they deprive religious Americans of their constitutional rights.  

In March of 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that the government should be held to the same strict standard as everyone else when it attempts to strategically make a case irrelevant. As Justice Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion, “To show that a case is truly moot, a defendant must prove ‘no reasonable expectation’ remains that it will ‘return to [its] own ways…That much holds for governmental defendants no less than for private ones.”  The Court’s reasoning closely tracked the argument in Becket’s brief, emphasizing that the government does not get special treatment in these cases. The decision will help ensure that the government is held accountable for violating Americans’ bedrock freedoms.