A federal lawsuit filed over the weekend asks a court to block the UFC fight card scheduled for the White House South Lawn on June 14, arguing the event violates federal law and amounts to a corrupt transfer of public property to a private company with direct financial ties to President Donald Trump.
The Public Integrity Project filed the suit Saturday in the DC District Court on behalf of two Virginia residents — Paul Romano, a retired Air Force sergeant and Vietnam War veteran, and civic activist Susan Douglas — naming the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior as defendants. The plaintiffs seek an emergency injunction and temporary restraining order, with the event six days away.
“This is fundamentally a private, commercial, corrupt use of our most sacred national monuments for private gain,” said Brendan Ballou, founder of the Public Integrity Project. Ballou also called it a “profoundly corrupt scheme to enrich the President and his friends.”
The suit argues National Park Service regulations prohibit sporting events on the South Lawn and at the Lincoln Memorial, where fighter weigh-ins are scheduled the night before the card. “The Lincoln Memorial is sacred ground, and it honors everyone who has ever worn this country’s uniform,” Romano said. “Using it as a backdrop for a for-profit cage fight so the President and his friends can make money is a desecration.”
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A 92-foot steel arch UFC calls “The Claw” — visible above the White House roofline and weighing roughly 600 tons — required congressional authorization the administration never sought. Organizers also proceeded with construction without conducting a mandatory environmental review.
The administration has argued that UFC Freedom 250 qualifies under congressional authorization for America’s 250th anniversary celebrations. The suit counters that the event appears on neither the official schedule of America 250 — the nonprofit Congress created in 2016 — nor that of Freedom 250, the separate public-private partnership, despite the UFC listing Freedom 250 as a sponsor. “The event is not in any material sense a ‘celebration of the 250th anniversary of American Independence,'” the filing states. “It is, instead, a celebration of the UFC’s brand and the 80th anniversary of Donald Trump’s birth.”
Trump’s May financial disclosures, filed with the US Office of Government Ethics, show him buying between $15,000 and $50,000 in TKO Group Holdings — the UFC’s publicly traded parent company — in March. UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump ally and 2024 campaign surrogate, acknowledged the fight was Trump’s idea. White’s company sells VIP packages for between $1 million and $1.5 million each, and a TKO executive called the event “the greatest earned-marketing tool of all time.”
Paramount+, streaming the event live June 14 with select prelims on CBS, is also named in the suit. Paramount is controlled by David and Larry Ellison, both publicly identified as Trump allies.
“The President arranged to hand two of America’s most cherished monuments to a private corporation so he and his allies could profit from them,” said Douglas. “These monuments belong to all of us Americans, not to Dana White, not to advertisers like Crypto.com, and not to Donald Trump.”
UFC Freedom 250 is headlined by a lightweight title unification bout between Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje, with former two-division champion Alex Pereira facing Ciryl Gane for the interim heavyweight title in the co-main. The date aligns with Flag Day and Trump’s 80th birthday. Construction crews began loading into the White House in May; Trump has compared The Claw to the Eiffel Tower and suggested it might never come down.
The UFC bypassed the DC Sports Commission, which had voiced concerns, by partnering with the Association of Boxing Commissions as the sanctioning body — ensuring the bouts count as professional fights.
A Trump administration official dismissed the lawsuit as “obstructionist, baseless, and dilatory,” saying the event “is no different than the various other White House-hosted events on the South Lawn and properly permitted events on the Ellipse and National Mall throughout the year.” The UFC had not publicly commented as of Monday morning.
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