A cage cashier at Circa Resort & Casino says she was sent home without pay after refusing to take off the headscarf she wore as part of her Messianic Jewish faith, and was ultimately fired in July 2024. Now the federal government is suing the downtown Las Vegas casino, accusing it of religious discrimination in violation of federal civil rights law.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed the lawsuit against Circa Resort & Casino in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, as first reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. According to the EEOC, the case was officially docketed as EEOC v. Circa Resort & Casino, Case No. 2:26-cv-03088, and was filed by the agency's Los Angeles District Office, which oversees federal equal employment enforcement across southern Nevada.
Per the Review-Journal's reporting, a Circa manager ordered the cashier to remove her headscarf and sent her home without pay when she refused. The casino's human resources manager then required her to provide a clergy letter validating her religious practice, but she could not do so because she did not belong to a formal synagogue.
HR Manager's Rationale at Center of Federal Complaint
The federal complaint goes further, alleging that Circa's HR manager demanded the clergy documentation specifically because the cashier's Messianic Jewish observances “did not comport with his personal views of Judaism,” according to Casino.org. Circa did not permit the employee to return to work, and the Review-Journal reports she was fired in July 2024.
The EEOC alleges Circa failed to accommodate the cashier's religious practice and attempted to resolve the matter through its administrative conciliation process before filing suit, per the Review-Journal. The agency says the treatment violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits religious discrimination and generally requires employers to reasonably accommodate employees' religious practices unless doing so creates an undue hardship.
“Federal law applies to all aspects of an individual's religious observance, practice and belief, and employers must make reasonable efforts to accommodate employees,” said Michael Mendoza, director of the EEOC's Las Vegas local office, per the Review-Journal. The lawsuit seeks monetary damages and other remedies for the former cashier.
Legal Standard Sets High Bar for Circa's Defense
Title VII's protections for religious accommodation are relevant to the cashier's inability to provide clergy documentation because she did not belong to a formal synagogue.
The U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Groff v. DeJoy also raises the bar for Circa's potential defense, according to Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP. Under that decision, an employer can deny a religious accommodation only by showing the request would cause “substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business,” a heightened standard compared with the previous, more lenient “de minimis cost” test. Separately, the Supreme Court's 2015 decision in EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, Inc. established that Title VII bars employers from making a worker's religious headscarf a motivating factor in employment decisions, according to court records published by Justia.
Casino Responds, Cites Ongoing Litigation
Circa Resort & Casino, located at 8 Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas, is linked to Derek Stevens, per Casino.org. A Circa spokesperson told the outlet the company denounces discrimination against any individual regardless of background or beliefs, but declined further comment citing the ongoing litigation. The Review-Journal reported that Circa had not responded to its own request for comment.
MGM casino-hotels have settled religious-discrimination matters related to COVID-19 policies.
The Circa filing also lands amid a broader wave of federal workplace enforcement activity in Las Vegas. The EEOC's Las Vegas office has also sued call center operator VRI Research over accommodation denials, a case Hoodline detailed separately. Nationally, retaliation complaints remain the largest single category of workplace discrimination charges the EEOC handles, accounting for 47.8 percent, or 42,301 charges, of the 88,531 total filings in Fiscal Year 2024, according to data from Lehr, Middlebrooks, Vreeland & Thompson.
