Logan Dyjak v. LANA MILLER and KATE PATAROZZI

United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
Chicago, Illinois 60604
Submitted February 2, 2026*
Decided February 5, 2026
Before
MICHAEL B. BRENNAN, Chief Judge
DAVID F. HAMILTON, Circuit Judge
THOMAS L. KIRSCH II, Circuit Judge
No. 24-3105
LOGAN DYJAK,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.
LANA MILLER and KATE
PATAROZZI,
Defendants-Appellees.
Appeal from the United States District
Court for the Central District of Illinois.
No. 21-cv-3206
Sue E. Myerscough,
Judge.
* We have agreed to decide the case without oral argument because the briefs and record
adequately present the facts and legal arguments, and oral argument would not significantly aid the
court. F ED . R. A PP. P. 34(a)(2)(C).
NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
To be cited only in accordance with FED. R. A PP. P. 32.1

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No. 24-3105 Page 2
O R D E R
Logan Dyjak,1 a civil detainee housed at the McFarland Mental Health Center2
in Springfield, Illinois, appeals the summary judgment rejecting their challenges under
the First Amendment to the facility’s visitation polices. See 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The district
court concluded that Dyjak’s claims were barred by qualified immunity. We affirm.
I.
Dyjak was housed in the minimally secure unit at McFarland in late 2019, when
officials implemented a new visitation policy for the facility. The policy required that
visits be prescheduled, limited to one hour, and allowed only during designated times.
Dyjak objected and submitted a grievance to the Human Rights Authority (a division of
the Illinois Guardianship and Advocacy Commission) complaining about the new
restrictions. The Human Rights Authority agreed with Dyjak and found that the blanket
one-hour limit violated Illinois law guaranteeing detainees “unimpeded, private, and
uncensored communication with persons … by visitation.” See 405 ILCS 5/2-103. The
Authority recommended eliminating the policy, absent evidence that longer visits
posed a risk of harm.
For several months during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020
through January 2021), McFarland imposed a complete ban on nonessential visitors. In
the spring of 2021, as the pandemic came under control, officials gradually expanded
visitation to allow more frequent and longer visits. Dyjak, however, continued to
complain that the facility still enforced the same narrow visitation hours.
In September 2021, Dyjak brought this § 1983 suit against Lana Miller
(McFarland’s Hospital Administrator) and Kate Patarozzi (the Treatment Services
Administrator) in their individual capacities, alleging that the facility’s visitation
policies were unconstitutionally restrictive. Dyjak also sued Illinois Governor J.B.
Pritzker and Grace Hou, the director of the Illinois Department of Human Services. At
screening, see 28 U.S.C. § 1915A, the district court dismissed Dyjak’s claims against
Pritzker and Hou because Dyjak could not plausibly allege that either official was
personally responsible for instituting the policies. The court allowed Dyjak to proceed
1 Dyjak uses they/them/their pronouns in the filings in this case, and we follow suit as we have
in Dyjak’s previous appeals (Dyjak v. Wilkerson, Nos. 21-2012 & 21-2119; Dyjak v. Harper, No. 22-1419).
2 McFarland has since been renamed the Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard Mental Health Center.
Because the relevant conduct occurred before the Center was renamed, we refer to it as “McFarland.”

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No. 24-3105 Page 3
with a claim against Miller and Patarozzi that the visitation policies violated Dyjak’s
First Amendment right to freedom of association.
Further proceedings ensued, and the district court ultimately granted the
defendants’ motion for summary judgment. As to Dyjak’s claim asserting a First
Amendment right to freedom of association, the court concluded initially that the
defendants had not carried their threshold burden under the four-factor,
rational-relationship test established by the Supreme Court in Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S.
78 (1987). See also Brown v. Phillips, 801 F.3d 849, 853–54 (7th Cir. 2015).3 But the court
then pivoted and determined that the defendants were entitled to qualified immunity
because Dyjak failed to identify a case that held facility officials individually liable for
First Amendment violations in connection with visitation policies like those here. The
court also rejected Dyjak’s attempt at summary judgment to add a First Amendment
retaliation claim, noting that its screening order had not authorized such a claim and,
regardless, Dyjak had not put forth evidence from which a reasonable jury could find
that Dyjak was subjected to more restrictive visitation rights because of protected
activities.
Dyjak moved for postjudgment relief under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 59,
arguing that the district court’s qualified immunity ruling was at odds with Taylor v.
Riojas, 592 U.S. 7, 9 (2020), in which the Supreme Court ruled that some violations were
so obvious that a prisoner did not need a prior opinion to establish his right to be free
from certain offending conditions. The court denied the Rule 59 motion, distinguishing
Taylor on grounds that the policies Dyjak complained of did not clearly violate Dyjak’s
First Amendment rights, particularly given the constraints the facility faced in the
pandemic’s aftermath.
II.
To overcome a qualified immunity defense, a plaintiff must show “(1) that the
official violated a statutory or constitutional right, and (2) that the right was ‘clearly
established’ at the time of the challenged conduct.” Sabo v. Erickson, 128 F.4th 836, 843
3 Dyjak argued that the claim should be evaluated under the standard in Youngberg v. Romeo, 457
U.S. 307, 323 (1982), which requires that “professional judgment” be exercised when providing mental-
health treatment to someone who is involuntarily committed. The district court rejected that argument,
ruling that Youngberg does not require that professional judgment dictate every aspect of civil
commitment, but only decisions concerning mental health treatment—a category to which visitation
policies do not belong.

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No. 24-3105 Page 4
(7th Cir. 2025) (en banc) (quoting Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, 563 U.S. 731, 735 (2011)). Courts
may address either prong first. Id. (citing Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 236 (2009)).
Dyjak maintains that the district court applied an outdated standard for qualified
immunity by disregarding the conclusion in Taylor that some circumstances are so
obviously unconstitutional such that analogous precedent is not required. But we agree
with the district court that the visitation policies in no way resemble the extreme and
plainly unconstitutional conditions at issue in Taylor, in which the plaintiff alleged that
he was confined for six days in prison cells covered in feces and flooding with raw
sewage. 592 U.S. at 8–9.
Dyjak next challenges the court’s qualified-immunity analysis on grounds that it
overlooked Easterling v. Thurmer, 880 F.3d 319 (7th Cir. 2018), a case that, Dyjak believes,
clearly establishes that detainees’ rights under the First Amendment could be violated
by a facility’s restrictive visitation policies. In Easterling, we confirmed that prison
officials may violate a prisoner’s constitutional rights by permanently or arbitrarily
denying visitation with family members. Id. at 323.
The defendants counter persuasively, however, that even if Easterling clearly
established—for purposes of the second prong of the qualified immunity test—that
McFarland’s pandemic-era visitation ban could violate Dyjak’s constitutional rights,
Dyjak cannot satisfy the first prong. That is, Dyjak did not introduce evidence from
which a reasonable jury could infer that Dyjak’s constitutional rights were in fact
violated by McFarland’s visitation ban at the height of the pandemic—the time between
March 2020 and January 2021. The Human Rights Authority’s findings, for instance,
addressed only the policy in place in 2019, preceding the time in question. Nor did
Dyjak present evidence calling into question whether the pandemic-era ban was
rationally related to McFarland’s legitimate interest in preventing the spread of
COVID-19. Civil detention facilities may impose reasonable restrictions on First
Amendment rights when justified by legitimate institutional interests. See Brown,
801 F.3d at 853–54. And McFarland explained that the visitation ban was intended to
“keep everyone healthy” and to “minimize the spread” of COVID-19. These are
interests that courts have repeatedly recognized as legitimate. See Lukaszczyk v. Cook
County, 47 F.4th 587, 603 (7th Cir. 2022) (public employees did not show that
governments lacked a reasonably conceivable state of facts to support city and county
vaccination policies during COVID-19); Wilson v. Williams, 961 F.3d 829, 840–41 (6th Cir.
2020) (prison officials responded reasonably to serious risks posed by COVID-19 by

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No. 24-3105 Page 5
implementing six-phase plan to mitigate risk of spread that included restrictions on
visitation).
Setting to one side the visitation ban for the months at the height of the pandemic
(March 2020 through January 2021), the defendants urge us to reject Dyjak’s argument
that Easterling provides clearly established authority that McFarland’s visitation policies
at other times (i.e., 2019 and 2021) could have violated Dyjak’s constitutional rights. The
defendants emphasize that McFarland’s visitation policies in 2019 and 2021, unlike the
policy at issue in Easterling, did not entirely prohibit visitation but merely imposed
limitations. The distinction is well taken. When determining whether a right was clearly
established, we must define the right “in terms granular enough to provide fair notice”
to officials that their conduct was unconstitutional. See Sabo, 128 F.4th at 845 (internal
quotation omitted). Nothing in Easterling suggests that these restrictions on the timing
or scheduling of visits could violate Dyjak’s First Amendment rights. See 880 F.3d at
321–23.
Dyjak continues to assert that the district court should have applied the more
deferential standard of Youngberg v. Romeo, 457 U.S. 307, 323 (1982), because visitation is
a crucial element of mental health treatment. But “[a] justified security policy is
not … viewed as a treatment program that must be supported by an exercise of
professional judgment.” See Lane v. Williams, 689 F.3d 879, 882–83 (7th Cir. 2012). Here,
McFarland’s visitation policies reflect decisions not to treat patients but to ensure the
safety of others.
Relatedly, Dyjak argues that the district court should have applied an
alternative test, set forth in Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U.S. 396, 409–12 (1974) (concerning
the extent to which First Amendment protections apply to prisoners’ outgoing mail),
which suggests that prison rules affecting the rights of non-prisoners may be subject to
more searching scrutiny than regulations affecting only prisoners. But as the district
court properly recognized, Dyjak is a civil detainee, and civil detainees’ First
Amendment claims are best analyzed under Turner’s rational-relationship test.
See Brown, 801 F.3d at 853–54; see also Thornburgh v. Abbott, 490 U.S. 401, 404 (1989) (even
where prison regulations affect the First Amendment rights of non-prisoners, the
“proper inquiry” remains the standard, derived from Turner, that asks “whether the
regulations are ‘reasonably related to legitimate penological interests’”).
Turning next to their First Amendment retaliation claim, Dyjak argues that the
district court overlooked evidence that McFarland imposed its visitation policies after
they filed grievances. But this sequence of events does not call into question the district

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No. 24-3105 Page 6
court’s conclusion that Dyjak failed to present evidence of being targeted by officials
specifically for engaging in protected activity. See Bridges v. Gilbert, 557 F.3d 541, 546
(7th Cir. 2009). Summary judgment on this claim was proper.
Lastly, Dyjak rehashes an argument rejected in their postjudgment motion. In
that motion, Dyjak argued that the court should not have considered their claims solely
as individual-capacity claims (which are subject to qualified immunity) rather than
official-capacity claims seeking injunctive relief (which are not subject to qualified
immunity). The district court rejected this argument, noting that it had permitted Dyjak
to proceed only on claims for damages and that Dyjak never moved to amend the
complaint to assert official-capacity claims for injunctive relief. Dyjak now contends that
the district court overlooked the complaint’s prayer for injunctive relief as evidence of
an intent to sue the defendants in their official capacities. But “[i]n an individual
capacity suit, a plaintiff may only seek monetary damages,” see Knowlton v. City of
Wauwatosa, 119 F.4th 507, 519 (7th Cir. 2024), and here, Dyjak expressly sued the
defendants in their individual capacities. If Dyjak wanted to seek injunctive relief
through an official capacity suit, “they could have (and should have) made that clear.”
Id.
AFFIRMED

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