Government officials are able to be sued for damages for violating constitutionally protected expressions of religion under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit stated Wednesday.

The finding came in a reversal and remand of a district court's dismissal of a suit brought by Muslim plaintiffs who claimed they'd been added to the federal no-fly list after refusing to become government informants.

The panel, composed of Chief Judge Robert Katzmann and Circuit Judges Rosemary Pooler and Gerard Lynch, disagreed with the reasoning of U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams of the Southern District of New York, who said the plaintiffs could not bring individual claims against Federal Bureau of Investigation agents under the RFRA.

Each of the plaintiffs made claims similar to the named plaintiff in the case, Tanvir v. Tanzin, 16‐1176. Muhammad Tanvir alleges that in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, federal agents attempted to recruit him as an informant, pressuring him on numerous occasions over a number of years. When he refused, Tanvir alleges he was threatened with deportation and other penalties.

In 2010, when he attempted to fly home from Atlanta to see his mother who was visiting from Pakistan, he was told by an airline employee that he would not be allowed on the flight. This would continue in the following years, preventing him from visiting family in Pakistan, despite attempts to go through the official process of being removed from the list.

In 2014, Tanvir and his co-plaintiffs, who made similar claims, sued on constitutional and statutory grounds that they were placed on the no-fly list as retaliation, despite posing no threat. The suit included claims against the FBI agents in their official capacities, as well as individual capacities, for damages, under the First Amendment and the RFRA.

In her September 2015 order dismissing the suit, Abrams said the RFRA did not permit the recovery of money damages from federal officers being sued in their individual capacity, holding that it was not Congress' intent when it passed the statute in 1993. Specifically, the court noted that the act was meant as a remedy to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith, re-establishing the strict scrutiny test when determining if the government's actions abridged religious rights.

The point, Abrams stated, was not to expand the remedies available, which allowing individual government agents to be sued for damages under the RFRA would do.

The panel disagreed. In its own close reading of both the procedural history behind the passage of the act, as well as the act itself, the circuit found an explicit right to sue agents in their individual capacities for damages, even as the official capacity claims remained nullified.

“[I]t is clear that a plaintiff may bring a claim for 'appropriate relief against' either federal 'official' or 'other person acting under color of [federal] law' whose actions substantially burden the plaintiff's religious exercise,” the panel said, quoting from sections of the act itself. “Therefore, RFRA, by its plain terms, authorizes individual capacity suits against federal officers.”

The panel reviewed at length in its 57-page opinion the debate over the term “appropriate relief,” which the act does not explicitly define. The panel found that the district court was wrong to deny damages, pointing to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1993 decision in Franklin v. Gwinnett City Public Schools, which determined that, absent Congress laying them out in a statute, all available remedies were presumed to be on the table.

The panel noted that its decision brings it in accord with a recent decision by the Third Circuit in 2016's Mack v. Warden Loretto FCI, which found a Muslim inmate in federal prison could sue over allegations of harassment under the RFRA.

“Today's decision should give pause to any FBI agent who is abusing the power to place people on the No-Fly List in order to turn them into informants,” said professor Ramzi Kassem of the CUNY School of Law, who led the plaintiffs' appeal. “But its significance is broader, still. In an important precedent, the court has held that, given standing, one can seek damages against individual federal officers for religious discrimination.”

A spokeswoman for the U.S Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, which handled the government's case on appeal, declined to comment.