Ex-Metro Transit employee claims religious discrimination in lawsuit
A former Metro Transit worker is suing the Metropolitan Council, claiming religious discrimination and workplace retaliation drove him out of his job.
A lawsuit filed Tuesday in Ramsey County District Court alleges Jihad Hamoud, who is Muslim, left his job in 2022 after repeated questioning of his religious accommodations, discrimination based on his faith, and disciplinary measures from management after reporting problems.
It also claims management sent police with Hamoud to pray after repeatedly declining his requests to do so during a 2021 discipline meeting with management.
The Met Council can't comment on ongoing litigation, spokesman John Schadl said in a statement. Metro Transit is just one service run by the regional planning organization.
The lawsuit comes after an investigation by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights found probable cause that the Met Council violated state antidiscrimination law and retaliated against Hamoud.
The council appealed the November 2024 ruling, but Human Rights Commissioner Rebecca Lucero reaffirmed her decision in January this year.
Minneapolis law firm Storms Dworak brought the lawsuit on Hamoud's behalf.
Hamoud had been an employee of the Met Council since 2010, when he was hired as a Metro Transit bus driver, according to court documents.
He transferred to a job cleaning and maintaining Metro Transit facilities in 2019. Work was based out of a central hub in St. Paul.
While in that position, Hamoud experienced multiple incidents of religious discrimination, the lawsuit claims.
In one incident detailed in the lawsuit, a supervisor blamed the bathrooms becoming dirty on Muslims ''who pray in there and wet up the whole place and throw tissue and paper towels all over the place and get the toilets clogged.'' Hamoud told the supervisor Muslims must pray in clean settings, the lawsuit said.
In another incident, according to the lawsuit, a Met Council janitor told Hamoud that Muslims were creating problems and leading to a conflict with Christianity.
Problems continued, but when Hamoud met with managers to discuss his concerns about religious discrimination, he was placed on administrative leave, according to the lawsuit.
When Hamoud returned to work, a manager accused Hamoud of driving past him and the janitor to intimidate him, and later called Hamoud into a meeting with two police officers present, according to the lawsuit. The manager allegedly accused Hamoud of insubordination.
As they waited for a union representative, Hamoud asked to pray, which, as a practicing Muslim, he is required to do five times a day. The manager allegedly directed the two police officers to 'keep an eye on' Hamoud while he prayed, causing him to, among other things, feel 'degraded, humiliated, disrespected, vilified, and discriminated against.'
Hamoud was placed on a five-day suspension without pay and escorted off the premises. In a later meeting between Hamoud's union and Met Council, the group's assistant director of Facilities Maintenance said the situation was 'blown out of proportion,' and 'border[ed] on ridiculous,' the lawsuit claims.
Hamoud returned to work, but continued to experience discrimination and eventually resigned in May 2022. He is seeking a total of $100,000 in damages and any other relief a court deems appropriate.
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USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
Trump travel ban includes 12 nations, partially restricts entry from seven others
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Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Harvard withheld their degrees for participating in a pro-Palestinian protest. They don't regret it.
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After the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas began, the 2024 tent encampments on Harvard Yard became one of the key symbols of a pro-Palestinian student movement that spread across the nation. At Harvard, both Jewish and Muslim students reported feeling uncomfortable, while a Advertisement On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251 people from Israel. Gaza health authorities have said that Israel's retaliatory offensive has The Harvard student protesters agreed days before commencement in 2024 to dismantle the encampment; university leaders Days later, the students found out they wouldn't graduate since they were not in 'good standing' with the university due to multiple campus policy violations related to the encampment. 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Joshi added that while there is a lot of excitement for Harvard's stance against Trump, the school's stance on free speech and academic freedom still 'rings hollow' to her. She is now finishing a master's degree in sociology at the University of Cambridge — funded by the Harvard fellowship that almost didn't materialize — and writing her dissertation on South Asian involvement in the Palestinian movement in the UK. After graduation, she plans to find legal work at a nonprofit. Overall, she remembers the Harvard protests as a success: They drew attention to the thousands of children who have died in Gaza and will never have the chance to grow up to get a degree, she said. Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. Erin Douglas can be reached at
Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Will Harvard win its legal battle against the Trump administration?
The high court has given more leeway to presidential powers, particularly on national security issues the White House has cited to justify its latest impositions on Harvard. Moreover, the battle of attrition could wear Harvard down on the financial front: the legal battles will be costly, and in the meantime, Harvard may lose students and scholars 'I think the government wins every time,' said Brad Banias, an immigration lawyer based in Charleston, S.C., and former trial attorney for the Justice Department. 'If I'm an international student and I have a choice between Harvard, Yale, Brown . . . why would I pick the one in a battle with the government?' Advertisement Under fire on multiple fronts, Harvard has filed two lawsuits against the administration: one to reverse the elimination of billions in federal funding after the school refused to agree to a series of demands; the second over the White House's efforts to block international students from attending Harvard, citing potential threats to national security. Advertisement On the latter fight, Harvard so far has won temporary relief. On Thursday night, US District Judge Allison D. Burroughs issued a temporary restraining barring President Trump from denying visas to all students seeking entry to the country to attend Harvard. Last month, the judge temporarily halted the administration's effort to immediately revoke Harvard's ability to enroll foreign students. 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During Trump's first term, in a 5-4 vote in 2018, the Supreme Court upheld his ban on travel to the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries, a victory that came after two prior versions of the ban were struck down. The court found presidents have broad statutory authority to make national security judgments involving immigration. Laurence Tribe, a law professor emeritus at Harvard, said he's confident the university would prevail before the Supreme Court. Advertisement 'This has nothing to do with national security,' said Tribe, a liberal lawyer who's argued before the court dozens of times. 'The courts aren't stupid; they recognize a fig leaf when they see one.' He said Harvard has no choice but to fight Trump's actions. He noted Columbia University's more conciliatory approach: The Ivy League school in New York City agreed to change certain internal policies earlier this year in the face of federal funding cuts, but the Trump administration has continued to hammer the college. On the same day Trump announced the latest move targeting the student visas of Harvard enrollees, his administration sent a letter to the accreditation agency that oversees Columbia, writing that the school has violated civil rights laws and asking it to open an investigation. 'Columbia has seen the consequences of trying to deal with him,' Tribe said. 'We are not going to cave.' Daniel DiMartino, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, said that if Harvard wins a permanent injunction, the school will be able to continue to admit foreign students, and likely run out the clock until Trump is out of office or the administration's attention shifts. 'If there is an injunction, essentially Harvard wins. If there is not an injunction, Harvard really is in trouble,' DiMartino said. But Trump's goal, he said, is not to stop foreign students from coming to Harvard: it's to cause the university enough problems that it has to agree to changes demanded by the White House. Trump and other conservatives say Harvard has discriminated against white and Asian people in admissions, failed to do enough to tackle antisemitism, and rebuffed efforts to have ideological diversity in its professorial ranks. Advertisement 'If their goal was actually just to forbid foreign students from Harvard, they would have done it much more slowly and given them notice,' DiMartino said. 'The administration is trying to make an example out of Harvard to threaten other universities into cooperating and not misbehaving.' And in a broad sense, with the legal fees that come with protracted fights, DiMartino said, 'Harvard will lose no matter what. It just matters how much they lose.' Harvard also sued the Trump administration in April after it announced it was slashing about $3 billion in federal grants to the university. That case is pending. Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge who teaches courses at Harvard Law School, said she believes the Supreme Court will come down on Harvard's side and predicted the case will move quickly because of the ongoing harm to the school and its students. Citing the administration's demand the school turn over disciplinary records and other information on international students, Gertner said the White House 'essentially wanted Harvard to be a whistle-blower,' and is now retaliating even though that information is not legally required or provided by any other schools. Northeastern constitutional law professor Jeremy Paul said the government is able to punish institutions that break the law, as the Trump administration says Harvard has in its handling of antisemitic incidents. But first, he said, they have to prove in front of a judge the institution has done so. They can't just make an allegation and then act unilaterally, as the administration has done, he said. 'The executive branch is acting as though they're both the prosecutor and the judge,' Paul said. Advertisement Shelley Murphy can be reached at
