A group of Bay Area parents and students are suing their local school district over a 2025 field trip where children were allegedly encouraged to wear Muslim religious attire like hijabs while visiting a mosque.

The federal suit filed last week by ten Palo Alto High School students names the Palo Alto Unified School District and Principal Brent Kline as defendants.

It alleges that photographs of the students were also posted online, without the parents’ permission.

Students were also ‘exposed’ to ‘a controversial speaker known for publicly documented hostile and discriminatory statements regarding Jews and sharply ideological political views’ known as Zahra Billoo, according to the suit.

Billoo, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), was ‘allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision,’ it alleged. 

Billoo, a civil rights lawyer who said Donald Trump was ‘going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews’ after he was reelected, told The San Francisco Chronicle this week that any ‘exposure’ to her was merely educational.

She said she only imparted her experiences as an American Muslim woman working in civil rights and social justice. The suit argues students were told that the tenets of Islam aligned with social justice work.

The plaintiffs are two Jewish parents of Palo Alto High students, three former Jewish students, a Hindu parent and another Zoroastrian. Four others are anonymous.

A group of California parents and students are suing their local school district over a field trip where young girls were allegedly encouraged to wear hijabs while visiting a mosque. Pictured, Palo Alto High School students visiting the mosque in question in November of last year

Pictured, the Muslim Community Association’s mosque in Santa Clara. The trip mentioned int he suit was part of a three-year program at the school that focus on addressing social problems

The trip was to the Muslim Community Association’s mosque in Santa Clara this past fall. It was part of a three-year program at the school that focused on addressing social problems.

The lawsuit maintains it was a ‘coercive school-sponsored religious activity’ that violated laws limiting partisan or biased advocacy in public schools. 

‘Public schools and the government have an obligation to remain neutral toward religion, but what neutrality does not mean is shielding students entirely,’ Billoo told the Chronicle.

‘The job of educators is to teach students, and expose them to different worldviews. That’s what happened here.’

She added that she was ‘concerned that this group of parents not only wants to counteract that for their own children… but is attempting to intimidate schools and school districts from doing necessary work of educating the next generation.’

Photos posted to the Muslim Community Association’s Facebook page, meanwhile, show her speaking to Palo Alto High School students back in November. It’s unclear if the photos show the trip specifically mentioned in the lawsuit.

Parents are now seeking monetary damages, as well as an admission from the school district that it was negligent in supervising students and violated their and parents’ privacy rights. 

Students on the trip were ‘exposed’ to  Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) leader Zahra Billoo, ‘a controversial speaker known for publicly documented hostile and discriminatory statements regarding Jews and sharply ideological political views’

Trips were organized by the school as part of a three-year program at the school that focus on addressing social problems

The federal suit names the Palo Alto Unified School District and Principal Brent Kline (pictured) as defendants

Palo Alto Unified School District Superintendent Jason Glass told the Chronicle Friday that the district only found out about the suit through news coverage. He said that he had yet to personally read the complaint.

He said the district had not yet been served with the court papers.

Glass could not yet verify the allegations.