A group of Michigan middle schoolers has asked the Supreme Court to decide whether public schools can ban student clothing bearing the phrase "Let's Go Brandon", a sanitized political slogan that contains no profanity, while a California high school district quietly backed down from suspending a student who posted flyers reading "We ❤️ I.C.E., Real Americans." The two cases, unfolding on opposite coasts, share a common thread: school administrators who treat conservative speech as a disciplinary offense while tolerating or ignoring left-leaning expression.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed the petition on behalf of pseudonymous students at Michigan's Tri County Area Schools, as reported by Just the News. The students were banned from wearing sweatshirts that read "Let's Go Brandon," a phrase that emerged as a euphemism for a vulgar anti-Biden chant. The school treated the slogan as though it were the profanity itself. A split panel of the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ban.

Now the students want the nation's highest court to step in, and the legal arguments in the petition expose a widening mess in how federal circuits handle student speech.

The 6th Circuit's subjective standard

At the heart of the petition, docketed as No. 25-1143, is a simple question: Can schools punish students for using a euphemism that everyone knows replaces a swear word, even though the euphemism itself contains no vulgar or profane language? The 6th Circuit said yes. Judge John Bush dissented, describing "Let's Go Brandon" as a "political slogan critical of a president but containing no words that are vulgar or profane."

The petition argues the 6th Circuit's approach hands teachers and administrators a blank check to suppress speech they personally find offensive. It warns the ruling authorizes contradictory decisions not just among schools in the same district but "between classes" in the same school, depending on which teacher is in the room.

FIRE's filing pulls no punches on the logic of the lower court's reasoning:

"The Sixth Circuit's approach defies common sense. English speakers throughout history have turned to sanitized expressions to avoid the social taboo of profanity."

The petition draws a direct comparison: saying "Let's Go Brandon" is no different from students saying "heck" or "shoot" as stand-ins for stronger words. If the euphemism can be banned because listeners know what it replaces, then the entire concept of a euphemism collapses, and schools gain the power to regulate thoughts, not words.

The Supreme Court has struggled with student speech for decades. In Morse v. Frederick, it narrowly upheld a school's punishment of a student who displayed a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner. The petition notes that even in that case, the Court admitted it was unsure how to apply its earlier Fraser standard 21 years later. Lower courts, FIRE argues, are now left "guessing" how to interpret the doctrine, and guessing in ways that consistently favor censorship of conservative viewpoints.

The Supreme Court's recent docket has been packed with politically charged cases, and this petition adds another layer: whether the First Amendment protects political speech by minors when that speech happens to mock a Democratic president.

A circuit split that demands resolution

FIRE's petition lays out a clear conflict among the federal circuits. The 3rd Circuit found that a middle school could not ban "I ♥ boobies!" bracelets without evidence of disruption. The 9th Circuit requires student speech to be "plainly" lewd or profane before schools can regulate it. The 2nd Circuit has said the Fraser precedent and related rulings are "difficult and confusing, even for lawyers, law professors, and judges" and has limited Fraser to similarly vulgar speech.

The 6th Circuit went the other direction, giving schools broad authority to suppress speech that administrators subjectively interpret as coded profanity. District courts in Indiana and Wisconsin have reached contradictory conclusions on the same "I ♥ boobies!" bracelets. The legal landscape is fractured.

The petition frames the stakes bluntly:

"Students' First Amendment rights do not and must not depend on the sensitivities of individual teachers."

It also takes aim at the 6th Circuit's reasoning as a throwback to an era of unchecked institutional authority over young people, stating the ruling "attempts to resuscitate the ironfisted authority over student speech that private school headmasters enjoyed in the 19th century. That era is over."

By one estimate, the 6th Circuit is the second-most overturned federal appeals court in the country. Whether the justices agree to hear this case will say a great deal about how seriously they take the growing confusion among circuits, and how far they will allow schools to stretch "profanity" to cover political slogans that contain none.

The petition also notes that the "Let's Go Brandon" phrase was used "everywhere from campaign rallies to the floor of Congress to convey disapproval of President Biden and his administration." It compares the slogan to the 1884 Republican chant "Ma. Ma. Where's My Pa?", a jab at Democratic presidential candidate Grover Cleveland that reminded voters he had fathered a child out of wedlock. Political euphemisms, FIRE argues, are as old as American politics.

Biden's post-presidency public profile has remained active. He recently resurfaced in South Carolina making political claims, a reminder that the man the slogan targeted remains a public figure, and that the speech the school banned was, at bottom, political commentary directed at a sitting president.

California school backs down on pro-ICE flyers

Three thousand miles from Michigan, a parallel fight ended not in a courtroom but with a quiet retreat. A student at Torrey Pines High School in California's San Dieguito Union High School District posted flyers reading "We ❤️ I.C.E., Real Americans." The school suspended him.

Torrey Pines told the student's guardians he was "directing harassment, threats or intimidation toward district staff or other students" by posting the flyers. The school cited a California state law prohibiting speech that "incites pupils so as to create a clear and present danger," a district policy against "conduct that creates a hostile or intimidating environment," and, remarkably, the 1942 Supreme Court "fighting words" doctrine, as The Times of San Diego reported.

Expressing support for a federal law enforcement agency now qualifies as "fighting words" in the eyes of a California public school. That framing alone tells you how far the Overton window has shifted in certain school districts.

FIRE intervened. Its litigators made immediate document requests, and the family retained FIRE's litigation attorneys. The district understood the legal exposure and moved quickly. This week, the San Dieguito Union High School District expunged the student's suspension.

FIRE Supervising Senior Attorney Conor Fitzpatrick did not mince words:

"The school district's censorship assumes that students cannot handle seeing even sanitized expressions."

FIRE told the school that administrators "can't pick and choose which opinions students are allowed to express." The organization noted the flyers caused no disruption and were "displayed in a common area where other students have posted political material."

The double standard is worth examining. Hundreds of students at the school carried anti-ICE posters featuring lewd slogans during a school walkout. None of those students was punished. But one student who posted a flyer expressing support for ICE, in a common area designated for political material, was suspended and told he was engaging in harassment.

The Supreme Court has been active on immigration-related questions. Justice Alito recently pressed his colleagues on statutory language in an asylum case, and the Court has issued significant rulings on immigration enforcement authority. Against that backdrop, a school district treating a pro-ICE flyer as tantamount to a threat looks less like a principled policy decision and more like political orthodoxy enforced through the disciplinary code.

A pattern, not an accident

These are not isolated incidents. The Supreme Court previously refused to review the 1st Circuit's approval of a Massachusetts middle school's ban on shirts reading "Only Two Genders" and "Only Censored Genders." Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas objected to the Court's refusal to take that case.

As Judge Bush explained in his dissent from the 6th Circuit ruling, "subjective standards are a petri dish for viewpoint discrimination and thus anathema to the First Amendment." The petition echoes that warning. When schools can decide that a phrase is punishable not because of its literal content but because of what an administrator believes it secretly means, the door is open to punishing any speech the institution disfavors.

The petition argues the phrase "Let's Go Brandon" is "plausibly interpreted as political or social commentary", which, of course, it plainly is. The question before the Court is whether that matters, or whether a school's subjective reading of a student's intent can override the words on the sweatshirt.

Five months before the 6th Circuit's ruling, the nation's largest federal appeals court affirmed that elementary school students have the same First Amendment rights as older students. The trajectory of the law, at least in most circuits, points toward protecting student political speech. The 6th Circuit went the other way.

The petition recommends a clear rule: schools may restrict actual "swearwords" or lewd actions at school. What they may not do is treat a euphemism, one used on the floor of Congress, at rallies, and across public life, as if it were the profanity it replaced.

That is a rule most Americans would recognize as common sense. Whether the Supreme Court agrees to enforce it will reveal whether the First Amendment still means what it says, even when the speaker is thirteen and the opinion is conservative.