Agriculture Department employees sued USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins on Wednesday, alleging she subjected workers to “government-sponsored religious coercion” by promoting an Easter message.
The lawsuit, filed by a union representing 19,000 USDA employees, centers on an Easter message Rollins shared, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ and other faith-based holiday messages.
On Easter Sunday, Rollins shared a memo with the roughly 100,000 USDA employees, saying, “Happy Easter — He is risen indeed!”
“From the foot of the Cross on Good Friday to the stone rolled away from the now empty tomb, sin has been destroyed. Jesus has been raised from the dead. And God has granted each of us victory and new life. And where there is life — risen life — there is hope,” Rollins wrote, according to Politico.
That message, according to the lawsuit, violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and the Administrative Procedure Act.
“Secretary Rollins’s practice and policy of subjecting agency employees to proselytizing messages conveys the expectation that USDA employees share in the Secretary’s religious beliefs, even when doing so would betray an employee’s own beliefs,” the lawsuit reads. “It is exactly the sort of government-sponsored religious coercion, religious sermonizing, and denominational preference that the Establishment Clause prohibits.”
For nonreligious USDA employees, the Christian message amounted to religious indoctrination.
“Secretary Rollins’s Easter Sermon draws heavily on biblical references that promote a particular religion — Christianity — which the Secretary’s message evangelizes as fact. The denominational favoritism conveyed in Secretary Rollins’s communications indoctrinates USDA employees and has caused them to feel coerced, unwelcome, excluded, and like outsiders to the agency,” the lawsuit said.
The organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the progressive legal advocacy group Democracy Forward also joined the case.
In a striking request, the plaintiffs ask the court to block Rollins and any other USDA official from issuing “such religious communications” and to declare the secretary’s religious messages unlawful.
“While we do not comment on pending litigation, we will keep the plaintiffs in our prayers during this process,” a USDA spokesperson said in a statement to The Daily Wire.
A vocal Christian, Rollins regularly speaks about her faith and has said she holds a Bible study with other members of the Trump Cabinet.
“We are very deep into studying service and being servants of God and servant leaders, but also being able to resist the temptation that comes with power — staying humble and serving God in these positions,” she said in June 2025.
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