Teacher sues after GOP policy labels 'everyone is welcome' sign as anti-Trump resistance

In deep red Idaho — a state that President Donald Trump won by 36.5 percent in 2024 — public schoolteacher Sarah Inama hung up, in her classroom, a poster that read, "Everyone is welcome here." But Inama was ordered by school officials to take it down, and now, she is filing a lawsuit in response.

According to her lawsuit, the poster's opponents viewed it as "political resistance" to the "rise of President Donald Trump" — and West Ada School District administrators told her that "not everyone agrees that 'everyone is welcome,' so it is a political opinion."

One of the poster's critics was Monty Hyde, principal at Lewis & Clark Middle School (where Inama was teaching social studies when she put up the poster).

School officials, according to Law & Crime reporter Chris Pérez, allege that the poster was a violation of Idaho House Bill 41 — which Idaho Gov. Brad Little, a Republican, signed into law in March 2025. The law forbids certain types of flags and banners on public school property and is being condemned as "censorship" by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Idaho.

Pérez reports, "School officials deemed Inama's poster as violating HB 41 after Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador defined 'poster' as falling within the statutory definition of a 'banner,' according to her complaint. He made the determination and then reiterated it in a June 2025 opinion filed with the state's Department of Education. Labrador concluded that the 'Welcome Poster' and others like it in Inama's classroom, including ones with rainbow colors, 'cannot be displayed in Idaho schools' because the posters 'are part of an ideological/social movement which started in Twin Cities, Minnesota following the 2016 election of Donald Trump,' according to Inama's complaint."

Labrador, a Republican, vigorously defended HB 41 in an op-ed published by right-wing Fox News on July 14, 2025.

The Idaho attorney general wrote, "The rainbow colors and progressive symbols accompanying these messages make their political purpose unmistakable…. These seemingly neutral terms mask a comprehensive worldview that undermines parental authority over children's moral development."