This story was originally reported by Sara Luterman of The 19th. Meet Sara and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

More than 25 years ago, Lois Curtis called a lawyer with the Atlanta Legal Aid Society from a pay phone in a hospital hallway. She had an intellectual disability and wanted help to get out of the state hospitals where she had lived for most of her life. Instead of spending her days heavily sedated and shuffling between the day room and the place where she slept, she wanted to be in her own apartment, to make her own decisions about what to do with her days. 

“She’d say, ‘Get me out of here. Would you please get me out of here? When am I getting out of here?’” recalled the lawyer, Sue Jamieson, in an oral history for the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.

With representation from the legal aid group, Curtis and her co-plaintiff, fellow Georgia resident Elaine Wilson, brought a challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor in 1999. In Olmstead v. L.C., which stands for Lois Curtis, the majority held that the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act guarantees that people with disabilities have a right to live outside the walls of asylums, state hospitals and nursing homes. 

More than two decades later, that right is under threat. In June, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice published a memo stating that the federal government has no obligation to enforce Olmstead. In August, the DOJ began withdrawing from cases where it had previously been defending people with disabilities (and their families) who wanted to receive care in their own homes.