Bay Area USDA workers sue over agriculture secretary's ‘Christ is Risen' email

Two San Francisco Bay Area USDA employees are among a group of federal workers suing Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, alleging she violated the First Amendment by sending agencywide messages that promoted Christianity to thousands of employees.

In an Easter email to Bay Area federal government employees Thomas MaGee, Anne Poopatanapong and thousands of their colleagues in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, USDA chief Rollins included above her message a colorful sketch of an open, flower-bedecked tomb with the words, "Christ is Risen" above it.

According to a lawsuit filed this week by MaGee and other USDA employees against the agency and Agriculture Secretary Rollins, that message, and another all hands missive from Rollins praising Jesus, violated the First Amendment's protection of religious liberty.

"She has adopted a practice of sending increasingly proselytizing communications to the entire USDA workforce, promoting her own preferred brand of Christian beliefs and theology to the captive audience of employees that report to her, directly or indirectly," the lawsuit filed Wednesday by Oakland employment-law firm Bryan Schwartz Law said.

A USDA spokesman said Friday that the department doesn't comment on pending litigation, but "we will keep the plaintiffs in our prayers during this process."

The lawsuit marks the latest in clashes over church-state separation regarding holiday greetings. Several erupted last winter over Trump administration officials' Christmas posts on the official social media account of the Department of Homeland Security and official accounts of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

The lawsuit filed in San Francisco U.S. District Court described MaGee and the six other individual plaintiffs as "a group of multi-faith and nonreligious USDA employees." The National Federation of Federal Employees is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, which described the union as "representing more than 19,000 USDA employees with diverse religious beliefs."

Among the named plaintiffs in the USDA case are MaGee and Poopatanapong, both U.S. Forest Service employees from Vallejo, California.

They want a court order declaring Rollins' "policy and practice of communicating proselytizing Christian messages to USDA employees" a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which seeks to uphold freedom of religion by banning the government from favoring a religion or imposing religious practices. And they want the court to bar the USDA and Rollins from "continuing to send or otherwise communicate proselytizing Christian messages."

Rollins started her "evangelizing" with generic references to God in Fourth of July and Thanksgiving messages to USDA staff last year, the lawsuit said.

But on Dec. 23, she "dramatically escalated her religious sermonizing in a Christmas message," the lawsuit said. A "Merry Christmas" email to all USDA employees included a video message from Rollins saying, "The spirit of generosity flows from the very first Christmas when God gave us the greatest gift possible, the gift of his Son and our Savior Jesus Christ, who came to free us from our sins and open the door to eternal life," the lawsuit alleged.

The April email to all employees, dubbed the "Easter Sermon" in the lawsuit and filed as Exhibit A, shows the tomb sketch with "Christ is Risen" over it and a message below from Rollins saying, "Team USDA, Happy Easter - He is risen indeed! Today we celebrate the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind."

Rollins' promotion of Christianity "indoctrinates USDA employees and has caused them to feel coerced, unwelcome, excluded, and like outsiders to the agency," the lawsuit said.

"They feel excluded and unwelcome, and they fear the negative consequences of not sharing the Secretary's religion or expressing their own different beliefs in the workplace."

The plaintiffs took legal action despite fear of retaliation, "to vindicate their Constitutional right to be free from the government imposition of religion," the lawsuit argued.

The lawsuit comes as the Religious Liberty Commission created by President Donald Trump through a May 2025 executive order fights a lawsuit in New York federal court by various faith groups. The plaintiffs in that case note the commission has only one non-Christian member - an orthodox Jewish rabbi - and is led by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who on his official webpage calls himself "a Christian first" and boasts of adding "In God We Trust" above the dais in the state Senate chamber. Meanwhile, four Republican-led states have passed laws requiring schools to post the Bible's Ten Commandments in public schools, actions supported by Trump that have set up a possible showdown in the U.S. Supreme Court over the separation of church and state.

"Secretary Rollins's proselytizing equates my calling to serve the public at the USDA with her personal calling to serve Jesus Christ," MaGee said in a statement provided by Bryan Schwartz Law. "While I respect her personal calling, she cannot declare USDA's mission to be her personal Christian mission. We both took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend a Constitution that leaves faith in our secular republic as a matter of choice."

MaGee has worked for the federal government for 27 years, the past 14 at the USDA, the lawsuit said.

"In all his almost three decades in public service, Mr. MaGee has never been afraid for his job because he is nonreligious until now," the lawsuit said.

Poopatanapong, the lawsuit claimed, "has to hide who she is or risk losing a job to which she is deeply committed" as a result of Rollins' statements.

The other plaintiffs are Adam Diamond, who works in the agency's Agricultural Marketing Service in Washington, D.C., and is Jewish; atheist Ashley Miller of the Forest Service in Columbia, South Carolina; Jennifer Wolfe of the Forest Service, a pagan who works remotely in California and experienced "religious trauma" as a Southern Baptist in her youth and now "reveres nature and recognizes multiple deities;" and Ethan Roberts, from the Agricultural Research Service in Peoria, Illinois. Roberts is another atheist, who feels Rollins is "conveying to him that he is unwelcome and ‘going to hell.'"

The lawsuit contains no allegations that workers have lost jobs or suffered penalties at work for not sharing Rollins' religious views.

However, when Iowa plaintiff Lanette Dietrich asked her supervisor to take her off USDA distribution lists used for religious and faith-based messages, but to continue having work-related communications sent, a director told her that was impossible, and should she elevate her request to the head of the National Resources Conservation Service where she worked, it would "create trouble" for her, the lawsuit alleged.

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This story was originally published May 15, 2026 at 10:15 PM.