Your Help May Save the Paly Mosque Lawsuit

The families who experienced this incident are the ones who can save the case.

The lawsuit filed against the Palo Alto Unified School District on August 7 has drawn a lot of publicity to a field trip that promoted one religion. An amended complaint was filed on August 10, 2026.

The story is bigger than that. A public school does not get to choose a religion for other people's children. Palo Alto did — with minors, on a school day, without telling their parents what would happen. And it was not one trip that went wrong. It was built into the course by design.

Intentionally Promoting a Political Version of One Religion

Palo Alto High School runs a three-year program called the Social Justice Pathway. According to the complaint, it visits exactly one house of worship — the Muslim Community Association's mosque in Santa Clara. Fall 2025 was not the first time, and it is not meant to be the last.

No church. No synagogue. No temple. That is the difference between teaching about religion and choosing one.

They were taught that Islam in particular promotes social justice

According to the complaint, female students were given hijabs and every student was given a Quran to keep. Students observed a midday prayer and met with participants in the mosque's Quran-memorization program. They were photographed inside the mosque in religious dress, and the images were posted publicly — no informed parental consent, no meaningful opt-out.

A public school handed scripture to minors and dressed them for someone else's worship service. Courts have struck down Bible distribution in public schools for decades. The principle does not change with the book.

They Chose a Political Speaker, Not a Religious Scholar

A guest speaker also addressed the students: Zahra Billoo, who runs the San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

No one has said who invited her — not the complaint, not the district, not Billoo. She is not an imam, not a scholar of Islam, not a member of the host congregation, and by her own account to the Chronicle she spoke about civil rights work rather than Islamic practice. Her record was a search away: the Anti-Defamation League has documented her telling an audience that Zionists are “your enemies,” and on October 7, 2023, with the massacre still underway, she posted that the world was “witnessing decolonization.”

The Anti-Defamation League has also documented that Billoo repeatedly and unapologetically has said that she views Zionism — the belief in Jewish nationhood — as racism. She has equated Israel to that of an apartheid regime, and clearly rejects the very idea of a Jewish state, calling for a Palestine “from the river to the sea.” She has lifted up statements that defend the terror organization Hamas’ intentional targeting of rockets to murder Israeli Jewish civilians, and has done so under the guise of someone working for peace. And in 2010, Billoo retweeted a highly offensive tweet that there is “no need for a holocaust museum, seeing as Israel has taken it upon itself to recreate it. #Israel #Nazis.” Billoo also has said that Zionism has no place in the LGBTQ+ community and antiracist movements; thereby, excluding the overwhelming majority of the American Jewish community.

Her organization has its own. Federal prosecutors named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing prosecution — never charged, and it denies wrongdoing. The FBI cut ties two years later over questions about Hamas links. Palo Alto once pulled a multi-faith picnic grant over CAIR's involvement, so the district cannot say it did not know.

The complaint is right. It is missing the only people who can prove it.

In state court it would matter less — AB 715 dropped the requirement that a protected group be directly harmed or even present. However, this case is in federal court. And students or their parents are needed — perhaps anonymously — to come forward to save this case.

If you were on one of these trips, you may be able to come forward without your name becoming public. Minors are identified by initials, and courts have let parents proceed anonymously in school religion cases. Take what you have — the permission slip, the syllabus, an email, a photograph — to a licensed attorney you trust.

One student who attended the field trip may decide whether this case is heard at all.

The record

Complaint (Aug. 7, 2026) · Amended Complaint (Aug. 10, 2026), No. 5:26-cv-08249 (N.D. Cal.). Prior coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle, Palo Alto Online, and the Palo Alto Daily Post.

This post concerns allegations in a pending lawsuit. Allegations are not findings, and no court has determined whether any of them are true. Statements attributed to Ms. Billoo, to CAIR, and to the district are drawn from published accounts and public records, including remarks to the San Francisco Chronicle. Nothing here is legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. The author is a civil rights litigator whose practice includes First Amendment and antisemitism discrimination cases. He is not counsel in this matter.