US military hopefuls hail ruling ending bar on HIV-positive people enlisting
Ever since he was a child, Isaiah Wilkins had dreamed of joining the US military and following in the footsteps of his many relatives, including his mother, who had served in the armed forces.
To make that dream a reality, Wilkins did everything he could.
At 17, he joined the Georgia national guard and enrolled at the Georgia Military College, where he earned an associate degree.
After that, he applied to the United States Military Academy at West Point, in New York, to pursue a commission in the army and was accepted into the academy’s prestigious preparatory school.
But, shortly after he entered the preparatory school, his dream came crashing down.
Wilkins was informed that he had tested positive for HIV, in a test performed while he was trying to join the army reserves as part of the application process for the academy. He was ultimately discharged from the military entirely, because of a Pentagon policy barring people with HIV from enlisting in the military, and limiting the service of active members diagnosed with HIV while in service.
“It was life-altering,” Wilkins said. “It felt like a big step back.”
In 2022, Wilkins, now 25, along with two others who encountered similar challenges when attempting to enlist or re-enlist in the military due to their HIV status, filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense. The action was taken with the help of Lambda Legal, a group based in New York that advocates for LGBTQ+ equality.
Attorneys representing Wilkins and the other plaintiffs argued that the military’s policies and regulations violated the equal protection guarantees of the US constitution and the Administrative Procedures Act.
The defense department argued that, among other things, deployments could make it difficult for HIV-positive individuals to maintain a strict adherence to their medication and that allowing HIV-positive recruits could impose “disproportionately higher financial costs on the military compared to individuals without HIV”, according to court documents.
After two years of litigation, last month a federal judge issued a historic decision striking down the government restriction.
In the ruling, issued in late August, the US district judge Leonie Brinkema ordered that the US military could no longer prohibit asymptomatic HIVpositive people who have undetectable viral loads from enlisting or re-enlisting in the US military.
Brinkema called the policy “irrational, arbitrary, and capricious” and said that it also contributed “to the ongoing stigma surrounding HIV-positive individuals while actively hampering the military’s own recruitment goals”.
The Department of Defense’s arguments, she said, were not supported by the evidence in the record.
In the order, Brinkema also referenced previous her landmark rulings she made in the last few years that struck down the defense department’s policies denying HIV-positive asymptomatic service members from deploying abroad and from joining as officers.
Those previous rulings led to Lloyd Austin, the US defense secretary, issuing a memo in 2022 stating that people who were HIV-positive would no longer be barred from serving in military leadership or serving overseas.
Before 2022, around 2,000 service members living with HIV had been banned from being deployed or from becoming commissioned officers, Lambda Legal reported.
“Modern science has transformed the treatment of HIV,” Brinkema wrote in her ruling last month. “Asymptomatic HIV-positive service members with undetectable viral loads who maintain treatment are capable of performing all of their military duties.”
She continued: “Now defendants must allow similarly situated civilians seeking accession into the United States military to demonstrate the same and permit their enlistment, appointment, and induction.”
As of 2022, around 1.2 million people in the US aged 13 and older had HIV, according to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
HIV is not easily transmitted to others, according to the CDC, and is mainly transmitted through sexual intercourse, as well as sharing drug injection equipment.
While there is no cure for HIV, medication can help manage it, reducing the amount of virus in the body to undetectable levels and preventing transmission through sex, per the CDC. The treatment can be in the form of oral medications or injections.
A 2023 report by the Congressional Research Service stated that between January 2017 and June 2022, 1,581 US service members were newly diagnosed with HIV, according to the Department of Defense’s armed forces health surveillance division.
After the district judge struck down the last remaining policy restricting those with HIV from serving in the US military last month, Gregory Nevins, the senior counsel and employment fairness project director for Lambda Legal,said he was pleased by the outcome.
“Americans living with HIV no longer face categorical barriers to service careers: discharge, bans on commissioning, bans on deployment and finally bans on enlisting,” he said.
Whether the government will appeal the ruling is unclear and “out of our hands” Nevins said, adding: “I think we should be calling it a day now; everyone’s had their day in court.”
The Department of Defense has not yet reacted. When asked for comment, a spokesperson redirected the question to the justice department, which declined to comment.
Not only did the ruling put in place a permanent injunction prohibiting the defense department from denying any asymptomatic HIV-positive individual with an undetectable viral load accession into the US military based on their HIV status, but the ruling also ordered that the decision to remove Wilkins from the West Point preparatory school be re-evaluated.
Wilkins is looking forward to resuming his path to commissioning as an army aviation officer in the US military, now that he is able, he said. Aviation officers in the army command flight platoons and lead operations using army helicopters, according to the US army recruiting website.
Wilkins described the ruling as a victory not only for him, but also “for other people living with HIV who want to serve”.
“As I’ve said before, giving up on my dream to serve my country was never an option,” he added. “I am eager to apply to enlist in the army without the threat of a crippling discriminatory policy.”
Wilkins said that while the litigation was ongoing, he received messages from “tons of people” asking for updates on the case, and telling him they were in the same situation as him, and also wanted to enlist in the US military.
“I’m not the only person in these shoes,” Wilkins said. “It’s just a privilege, it’s an honor to be able to be in this position, to be able to represent a whole class of people, it’s about a massive group of people who want to serve their country and were denied because of really just a discriminatory policy that’s now been knocked down.”
Wilkins hopes to start school again as soon as possible and get back on the career path to commissioning as a second lieutenant and becoming an army aviation officer.
While he is still figuring out his next steps, he said his likely options include returning to the West Point preparatory school or exploring reserve officers’ training corps college programs.
Nonetheless, it puts him years behind a lot of his peers, although overall he is grateful.
“A dream delayed is better than a dream denied,” he said.