The Justice Department under the Trump administration has asked a federal appeals court to throw out a courtroom victory the government itself won against Florida over the treatment of children with complex medical needs.

According to an NPR report published Thursday, the department made the request in August, asking the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to set aside its March decision and return the case to the district court. The move came after the Justice Department reversed its long-held view that federal disability law requires states to help people receive care in community settings whenever appropriate, rather than unnecessarily placing them in institutions.

The case dates back to 2013, when the Justice Department sued Florida under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the portion of the law that prohibits disability discrimination by state and local governments. The government alleged that the state had failed to provide a sufficient number of in-home and community-based services for children with medical conditions, forcing some families to place their children in nursing homes and leaving others at risk of institutionalization.

In 2023, after years of litigation, a federal district court ruled in the government's favor and ordered Florida to overhaul its Medicaid system. The injunction required the state to improve care coordination and to ensure that medically complex children received at least 90 percent of the private-duty nursing services they were authorized to receive.

Florida appealed. On March 31, however, the 11th Circuit preserved the government's victory, affirming the district court's findings of liability and holding that the Americans with Disabilities Act violations were widespread enough to warrant systemwide relief, even as it modified several aspects of the injunction.

The Justice Department then shifted its legal stance. In a June 18 opinion, the department's Office of Legal Counsel, the office whose legal interpretations guide the executive branch, stated that neither Title II of the ADA nor Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act imposes an "integration mandate" on states. The opinion acknowledged that its interpretation was "out of step with the common understanding" of the Supreme Court's 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C., which is widely understood to bar the unnecessary institutionalization of people with disabilities.

On August 13, the department filed an unopposed motion with the 11th Circuit asking the court to set aside its March ruling and remand the case to the district court. The filing puts the fate of the March decision, and the systemwide relief it endorsed, in the court's hands.

Jennifer Mathis, a disability rights lawyer at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, told NPR that the reversal was "shocking."

"To do that in a case that involves ripping children away from families, taking them out of the homes where they have families that want to take care of them, and to force those children to grow up in an institution, really is just unthinkable to me and is incredibly heartless," Mathis said.