The military’s policy on HIV enlistment has long been a contentious issue, but recent legal developments have sparked hope for change. In late May and early June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit took two unexpected steps that have significantly impacted the ongoing case, Wilkins v. Hegseth. The court agreed to rehear the case before the full panel and clarified that it had lifted a stay that had kept the enlistment ban in force. This decision allowed individuals with well-managed HIV to once again attempt to enlist while the case progresses.
Isaiah Wilkins, the lead plaintiff in the case, expressed his optimism about the recent developments. “It just continues to show that there’s hope in the fight,” Wilkins told The Advocate. “Things were looking bleak after our oral arguments in Virginia. I think it just demonstrates that science can prevail.”
Isaiah Wilkins’ Journey: A Military Dream Deferred
For Isaiah Wilkins, the stakes are deeply personal. At 27, Wilkins has always been drawn to a life of service. With a family history steeped in military tradition, he enlisted in the Georgia Army National Guard at 17 while attending Georgia Military College. His instructors encouraged him to apply to West Point, and he was accepted to the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School. Wilkins envisioned a 20-year military career, possibly in aviation, flying medical evacuation aircraft.
“You’re really there on the worst day of somebody’s life to help get them the help that they need,” Wilkins said, reflecting on his aspirations. However, during a summer training event at West Point, his dreams were abruptly halted. Routine entrance bloodwork revealed he was living with HIV. Despite his medical condition being well-managed with one pill a day Wilkins was dismissed from the program.
“They just kind of gave me the boot, for lack of a better word,” Wilkins recalled. This rejection marked some of the darkest days of his life. He found support in his best friend, a fellow first responder, and a West Point staffer who turned weekly board game nights into a form of therapy. His family, conservative and religious, surprised him with their unwavering support.
Wilkins channeled his drive into law enforcement and is now a Georgia state trooper, a job that, like his envisioned military career, puts him at the scene of people’s worst days. “There’s something about being part of an organization that’s greater than yourself and having the opportunity to help people,” he said. Wilkins emphasizes that his medical reality is almost mundane. “One pill a day,” he said. “That’s pretty simple.”
The Legal Battle: A Long and Winding Road
The legal road to this moment has been anything but simple, according to Scott Schoettes, a longtime HIV rights attorney and co-counsel on the case alongside attorney Peter Perkowski. Schoettes, who is living with HIV, has spent years challenging military policies that he says remain rooted in stigma rather than science.
In, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia struck down the enlistment ban, calling it “irrational, arbitrary, and capricious.” The government appealed, and in February, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit sided with the Defense Department and reinstated the ban. The plaintiffs then filed what Schoettes described as a long-shot petition asking the full court to rehear the case.
The Fourth Circuit granted the petition, and then came the second surprise: The court clarified that the panel’s stay had dissolved along with the vacated opinion, meaning Brinkema’s injunction was back in force. For people living with HIV, Schoettes said, the impact is immediate. “Go into the recruiting center, and if they are turned away or told that they can’t, then we’d like to hear from them,” he said.
The government is still trying to close that door. In an update after his interview, Schoettes said the Justice Department filed a motion on June 1 to reinstate the stay, and the plaintiffs filed their opposition on June 11. “The DOJ didn’t explain why they bypassed the district court and went straight to the Fourth Circuit,” Schoettes said in a follow-up message. “We think they were trying to avoid an adverse ruling and to hurry things along.”
A Decade-Long Fight: Kevin Deese’s Story
Kevin Deese is living proof of how long it can take to achieve victory. Deese was a Naval Academy midshipman in 2014 when, on April 1, the commandant of midshipmen called him in to tell him that follow-up bloodwork had revealed he was living with HIV. He would be allowed to graduate but not commission as an officer with the rest of his class.
“That was the hardest day of my life for sure,” Deese told The Advocate. His case, Deese & Doe v. Austin, became one of the foundational legal challenges to the military’s HIV policies. Filed in 2018 by Lambda Legal, the Modern Military Association of America, and Winston & Strawn, it was brought on behalf of Deese, who is gay, and a former Air Force Academy cadet identified by a pseudonym. Both had graduated from their respective service academies but were denied commissions because of their HIV status.
In 2026, the government settled, agreeing to commission both as officers in recognition of the careers they had earned years earlier. Deese now serves in the Navy Reserve. He stressed that he was speaking for himself and that his comments were not endorsed by the Navy or the Defense Department. “I’m very thankful to have finally gotten the opportunity to serve now in the Navy Reserve,” Deese said. “But it took 10 years of fighting.”
Deese urged Pentagon leaders to weigh the human cost of the remaining ban. “Consider the disruption also to the lives of those who are ready and able and willing and eager to serve,” he said. “As long as that door is still closed, I’m still going to be knocking on it.” His message to Wilkins and the other current plaintiffs is the one he wishes he had heard sooner. “This isn’t over unless you decide it is,” Deese said. “The only outcome you can guarantee is if you decide to stop fighting.”
Fighting Stigma and Policy
What makes the fight unusually hard, Schoettes said, is that much of the legal work is basic education. “It is 95 percent of what we’ve done in the cases,” he said. The military has raised concerns about access to medication during deployment, blood donation, and battlefield transmission. Schoettes said those arguments rely on outdated assumptions. HIV treatment can be as simple as one pill a day or a shot every few weeks. Blood donation is voluntary, not a requirement of service. And the fear that a person with HIV will transmit the virus by bleeding on a battlefield, he said, is not supported by real-world evidence.
“That’s never been a documented way in which HIV has been transmitted,” Schoettes said. That legal argument is also a cultural one. HIV stigma has always depended, in part, on making people seem more dangerous than they are.
Wilkins knows that stigma intimately. He has learned to stay out of the comment sections on stories about his own case. He has also changed the way he talks about himself. At one medical appointment, he recalled referring to himself as HIV-positive. A clinician gently corrected him. “You’re just a person living with HIV,” the clinician told him. The language stayed with him. So did the loneliness of realizing how little many people still understand about HIV.
“I think one of the big things. to tackle stigma is, it’s a lack of knowledge,” Wilkins said. He became a named plaintiff, he said, because others had gone first. He pointed to Nicholas Harrison, an attorney living with HIV who was commissioned in 2026, and other litigants who challenged the military before him. “I felt like I had a responsibility,” he said, “a responsibility to people who are living with HIV, who are not in a place that they can speak up and voice their opinion and go up against the largest, most powerful, most financially capable organization that the world has seen.”
For anyone who decides to test the reopened door, Schoettes offered practical advice. Be honest about your health status, document every interaction with recruiters, and reach out to his team or Minority Veterans of America, an organizational plaintiff in the case. But for now, the door is open. Wilkins, who once sat in a colonel’s office wondering if his life and military future were over, can try again. So can others.
If he could speak to the teenager who received that diagnosis at West Point, he knows what he would say. “Number one, you’re going to be OK,” Wilkins said. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you’re going to be OK.” And for the future, he said, there is still hope.
