D.A. v. Tri County Area Schools: School District Forces Students to Remove “Let’s Go Brandon” Sweatshirts

Complaint - D.A. v. Tri County Area Schools

Petition for Writ of Certiorari - D.A. v. Tri County Area Schools

Michigan’s Tri County Area School District does not like when students exercise their First Amendment rights. In 2022, two students at Tri County Middle School wore sweatshirts to school with the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon,” a political slogan that became ubiquitous for expressing disapproval of the Biden administration. The sweatshirts did not cause any disruption, yet school officials ordered the students to remove their political attire or face punishment. 

The U.S. Supreme Court made clear a half-century ago that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Criticizing elected officials, which is core political speech, is at the zenith of First Amendment protection. Schools should encourage students to express themselves politically because it trains the next generation of leaders to live in a pluralistic country where their neighbors and coworkers might not think, pray, or vote the same way they do. 

Yet a District Court and divided Sixth Circuit panel approved the school’s ban on the “Let’s Go Brandon” slogan. To get there, they interpreted Supreme Court precedent permitting schools to censor “profanity” as authorizing censorship of anything an individual teacher or administrator thinks is “vulgar.” But just as other sanitized expressions like “heck,” “shoot,” and “darn” are not profane, neither is “Let’s Go Brandon.” And letting individual teachers decide what speech is too “vulgar” or “profane” invites viewpoint discrimination and a patchwork of shifting Constitutional rights. 

On March 26, 2026, FIRE filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Sixth Circuit’s decision and restore the First Amendment rights of hundreds of thousands of public-school students.