Institute for Constitutional Military Law v. Trump

ICML is a nonpartisan institute (NGO) that defends the constitutional rights of service members and veterans before the boards, in the courts, and in Congress. Its work rests on three pillars: research, advocacy, and litigation.

The Defense Department posts the administrative law decisions of its discharge review boards and boards for correction of military and naval records on one website, boards.law.af.mil. On October 6, 2026, the Institute tested the site’s search functionality on each of the six boards for decisions containing the word “the.” Across the six boards of the Army, the Navy and Marine Corps, and the Air Force, the search returned about 38,600 of the 286,719 published files. It did not return the other 87 percent. At the Naval Discharge Review Board the search reported 237 results for “the” and the same 237 for “discharge,” out of 35,940 files. And many of the decisions the boards post cannot be read on the screen. About one in three files, and nearly all Naval Discharge Review Board decisions, are Rich Text or Word documents, which a web browser cannot display. Clicking one does not open the decision. It downloads the file to the reader’s computer, where it must be opened in a word processor, one decision at a time. These are legal decisions of the federal government. A correction board’s correction is, by statute, except when procured by fraud, “final and conclusive on all officers of the United States.” 10 U.S.C. § 1552(a)(4)(A). Yet nearly four in five of the boards’ files are plain-text, Rich Text or Word files, and every file is listed only by file name and date, with no summary and no index.

Its advocacy

The Institute carries that evidence to the people who can change the law, in Congress, the military departments, and the states. Through the 50-State Initiative, it is working to repeal the state and local rules that punish veterans for an administrative discharge given without a trial. It provides model language to any legislature or agency that wants to fix its rules.

ICML v. Trump.

On November 10, 2026, the Marine Corps birthday, the Institute sued the President and the Defense Department in federal court in Springfield, Illinois, to make the military review boards’ decisions public and searchable, as Congress required.CourtU.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois, Springfield DivisionCase numberNo. 3:26-cv-03388-CRL-DJQFiledNovember 10, 2026JudgeColleen R. LawlessStatusOpen