Eglise Baptiste Bethanie De Ft. Lauderdale, Inc., et al. v. Seminole Tribe of Florida, et al.

Six members of a reservation-based tribal police force, while in uniform, using a marked vehicle and carrying departmental firearms, during a sabbath service intervened in an off-reservation dispute over the leadership of a church and installed a dissident faction of the congregation. This petition presents two significant questions:

1. Is a Native American tribe sovereignly immune from a civil suit for damages caused by the off-reservation violations by its police officers of the “place of religious worship” provisions of the Freedom of Access To Clinic Entrances Act of 1994, 18 U.S.C. § 248(a)(2) (“the Access Act”)?

2. Are the “place of religious worship” and civil remedies provisions of the Access Act, as applied to a congregational leadership dispute, unenforceable because those provisions violate the Establishment of Religion and Free Exercise of Religion Clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution? The Court of Appeals and the District Court answered the foregoing questions in the affirmative. The former question was reserved for future resolution in Footnote 8 of Justice Kagan’s opinion for the Court in Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community, 572 U.S. 782, 799 (2014): We have never, for example, specifically addressed (nor, so far as we are aware, has Congress) whether immunity should apply in the ordinary way if a tort victim, or other