Judge John Coughenour blocked Trump's birthright citizenship order from the bench and made national news doing it.
His next target was a mother with no way to fight back.
What he did next has parents across America demanding Trump act to save her.
How a California School Secretly Transitioned Her Son Without Consent
Shana Gaviola is a 39-year-old mother of four from Fresno, California.
She had no criminal record and no history of violence — just a mother who refused to stand aside.
Gaviola's son Blake was 13 when he announced he wanted to be a girl.
His mother said no.
She believed it was a phase – a teenage boy going through something that would pass if adults around him acted like adults.
She was almost right.
What she didn't know was that Blake's Fresno public school was pushing him toward a gender transition behind her back – using a female name, coaching him about sex-change interventions, and deliberately hiding it from the one person with the legal authority to make decisions about his life.
A school district was rewriting her son's identity without telling her.
When Gaviola found out and tried to intervene, the system didn't help her. It armed her son against her.
In 2021, with the help of a family friend named Susan Reynolds, Blake obtained a restraining order against his own mother and filed for emancipation.
Gaviola's attorneys argue the service of that restraining order was defective – and that as the child's legal custodial parent under an existing custody decree, she retained the authority to direct her son's care.
She hired a transport team of former law enforcement to take Blake to Agape Ranch, a Christian boarding school in Missouri.
The 27-hour drive was conducted with Blake in restraints – a detail the DOJ made sure ended up in every headline.
Shana Gaviola Got 3 Years While Rapists Walk Free
Blake was held at the school for eight days before his biological father retrieved him.
Biden’s DOJ called it kidnapping and terror.
The FBI announced Blake could "rest easier knowing that justice has been served."
Those words belong in a press release about a predator – not a first-time offender who believed she was protecting her own child.
Judge Coughenour sentenced Gaviola to three years – nearly the statutory maximum for this charge, for a woman with no prior record.
Gaviola said it herself: "I would not be going to prison if I had done nothing. That's the part I can't accept – the law was safe for the mother who looks away, and unforgiving to the one who didn't."
The Detail the DOJ Buried: Her Son Never Transitioned
Blake is now 21 years old. He never transitioned.
The mother the DOJ described as a kidnapper and terrorist was trying to stop something irreversible from happening to a teenager – and she turned out to be right.
While Americans watched left-wing judges in Democrat cities put rapists and murderers back on the streets that same week, a California mother got three years for refusing to look the other way while her son's school rewrote his identity without her permission.
That is the two-tiered justice system in plain sight.
Trump Pardon for Shana Gaviola: Parents Are Demanding Action
Gaviola's attorneys have formally applied to President Trump for a full and unconditional pardon, asking him to invoke his constitutional clemency power directly rather than wait for the standard five-year post-sentence process.
Parent groups across the country have been flooding the White House with letters of support.
The U.S. Department of Education already found this year that California's Department of Education violated federal law by hiding students' gender transitions from parents – the exact same behavior that started this entire case.
Schools across the country are doing this right now – secretly pushing children toward gender transitions in Massachusetts, Ohio, Colorado, and California without parental knowledge or consent, then using the legal system to punish parents who fight back.
A federal prison sentence for protecting a child from an agenda the federal government itself just declared illegal — that is what executive clemency was built for.
Three other children are waiting for their mother to come home. Trump should bring her there.
Sources:
- Erin Friday, "California Mother Sentenced to 3 Years in Prison Over Trans-Identified Son's Transport to Christian Boarding School Seeks Presidential Pardon," The Post Millennial, August 11, 2026.
- Kyle Becker, "A Mom Is Heading to Prison for Rescuing Son From Transgender Activists, Unless Trump Pardons Her," RedState, August 22, 2026.
- U.S. Department of Justice, "Mother Sentenced to 3 Years in Prison for Interstate Violation of Protective Order Regarding Her Estranged Teenage Son," Eastern District of California, April 27, 2026.
- U.S. Department of Education, "U.S. Department of Education Finds California Department of Education Violated Federal Law by Hiding Students' Gender Transitions from Parents," 2026.
- Alliance Defending Freedom, "Why Secret Social Transitions Betray Parents and Harm Students," April 29, 2026.
