08/28/2026
🚨 ALARMING: New York is driving a 25,000-person Amish community toward the state line over privately funded one-room schools, religious conviction, and a childhood vaccine schedule that no longer leaves room for faith.
New York’s Amish have told Albany to restore religious conscience in school immunization law or they will leave the state, and if the Supreme Court will not hear them or will not grant relief, attorneys say a mass departure is likely, with Pennsylvania the most probable destination.
The community generally avoids both lawsuits and injectables, yet it is in federal court because state health officials keep fining tiny private schools that receive no public money.
In 2019, after a measles outbreak in an Orthodox Jewish community, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo repealed religious exemptions for school vaccine requirements, making New York only the second state to do so after California, while still allowing medical exemptions under the same statute.
Children must receive roughly twenty-four to twenty-seven doses on the Department of Health schedule to attend kindergarten through twelfth grade.
Upstate Amish families teach their children in one-room schoolhouses of fifteen to twenty-five students on private land, and they have been fighting that Cuomo-era decree in court since 2024.
The state began issuing two-thousand-dollar fines for noncompliance in 2022, and three plaintiff schools (Shady Lane in Clymer, Pleasant View in Heuvelton, and Dygert Road near Canajoharie) have already accumulated one hundred eighteen thousand dollars in penalties.
Counsel say every Amish school in New York faces the same pressure, though the Department of Health would not say how many other schools have been fined.
One attorney representing the families notes that the only realistic way to collect those sums would be for the state to take land.
Lead plaintiff Ezra Wengerd of Canajoharie, an Old Order father, wrote the state by hand that his people are a peace-loving religious group, sorry to cause the government trouble, and grateful for the freedoms New York has long extended to them.
He also wrote that God requires them to put their trust fully in Him, which they understand to conflict with placing that trust in vaccines, and that they are commanded not to be conformed to this world.
They would rather stay in New York, but their faith comes first.
The Second Circuit already ruled against them.
The Supreme Court sent the case back and told the panel to look again, after which the circuit reissued its original decision, and next month the Amish will petition the Court to take Miller v. McDonald.
Their argument is that a law which still allows medical exceptions is not truly general, and that religious need cannot be treated as a lesser hardship.
Wisconsin v. Yoder still hangs over any effort to force an Amish way of life into the modern administrative state, even as scholars caution that the Court has often been wary of vaccination cases and New York will argue that it is protecting the public as a whole.
Attorney Hiram Sasser asked whether the country still intends to make room for the Amish, calling them part of the American fabric and a practical test of religious liberty.
A privately funded schoolhouse that takes nothing from the public treasury should not be billed into submission for following a creed older than the mandate.
The Department of Health says it must protect public health, enforce the law evenly, and prevent deaths from vaccine-preventable disease, and that school immunization rules are based in science.
Those claims can be examined on their merits, but what remains is a community still living close to the old one-room schoolhouse ideal, facing six-figure fines for refusing to abandon its beliefs.
If the Supreme Court declines this case or blesses the Second Circuit’s approach, religious exemptions and parental medical judgment will survive only until the next outbreak, the next governor, and the next rule that cuts through a minority’s faith.
If New York can fine a peaceful people off their land for teaching their own children by their own lights, religious liberty is already a permission slip, and the next community in the way won’t even get a warning.
