A person secures the flags during a ceremony where New York City officials re-raise the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, on Feb. 12, 2026, after its removal by the National Park Service earlier this week. <\/p>\n
Timothy A.clary | AFP | Getty Images<\/p>\n
The Trump administration<\/a> was sued Tuesday over the abrupt removal of the Pride rainbow flag last week from the Stonewall National Monument<\/a> in New York City, at the site of the 1969 uprising that ignited the gay rights movement in the United States.<\/p>\n The lawsuit<\/a>, filed by a group of LGBTQ+<\/a> advocates and a Greenwich Village community group, said the federal government claimed that Department of the Interior<\/a> rules bar the flying of anything but the U.S. flags, DOI flags, and the POW\/MIA flags in national parks.<\/p>\n “In fact, the opposite is true: The policies the government says require removing the Pride flag expressly permit the [National Park Service<\/a>] to fly other flags that provide historical context to national monuments \u2014 which is precisely what the NPS official Pride flag did at Stonewall for many years,” the lawsuit says.<\/p>\n The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan a day after a federal judge in Philadelphia ordered the National Park Service to restore an exhibit at Independence National Historical Park that contained information about the nine slaves who lived with President George Washington in the official presidential residence in Philadelphia in the 1790s. <\/p>\n That order will remain in effect pending the outcome of the city of Philadelphia’s lawsuit challenging the NPS’s removal of the exhibit in January.<\/p>\n The Pride flag had flown at the Stonewall National Monument since 2022 after a flagpole was installed there.<\/p>\n The monument is located across from the Stonewall Inn, where a July 1969 police raid of the then-underground gay bar was resisted by patrons, and followed by days of riots and protests.<\/p>\n “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living authentically as a lesbian, a bisexual person or a gay man was illegal,” the NPS page for the monument says. “The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 is a milestone in the quest for civil rights and provided momentum for a movement.<\/p>\n People gather in protest at the Stonewall National Monument after the Trump administration had the National Park Service remove the LGBTQ+ Pride flag from the site, which is considered the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, on Feb. 10, 2026, in New York City.<\/p>\n Spencer Platt | Getty Images<\/p>\n The new lawsuit in Manhattan federal court called the flag’s removal on Feb. 9 “a textbook example of an arbitrary and capricious act.”<\/p>\n “This was no careless mistake,” the suit says. “The government has not removed other historical flags at other national monuments, most notably Confederate flags. Meanwhile, the assault on Stonewall is the latest example in a long line of efforts by the Trump Administration to target the LGBTQ+ community for discrimination and opprobrium.”<\/p>\n New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani<\/a>, in a Feb. 10 post on X<\/a>, said, “I am outraged by the removal of the Rainbow Pride Flag from Stonewall National Monument.”<\/p>\n “New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history,” Mamdani said.<\/p>\n Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, on Sunday said he would introduce a bill to make “the Pride Flag a congressionally authorized symbol.”<\/p>\n Read more CNBC politics coverage<\/p>\n