A Texas high school sophomore has filed suit against San Antonio's Northside Independent School District, seeking to block her expulsion for refusing to wear a radio frequency identification badge in school. The girl and her parents are claiming the policy is a violation of her First Amendment rights, citing religious beliefs as the reason she has refused to wear the badge.

Northside began issuing RFID badges to students at two schools in September as part of an effort to track students within the school and their attendance of classes. Back then, Northside spokesman Pascual Gonzalez told Wired's David Kravets that the RFID cards were an essential part of making sure they could get state aid tied to attendance. "What we have found, they are there, they're in the building and not in their chairs," Gonzalez said. "If they are on campus, we can legally count them present."

The student involved in the suit, Andrea Hernandez, was attending Rutherford Institute Science and Engineering Academy. Her family had protested the district's RFID policy on First Amendment and civil liberties grounds, claiming that the requirement to wear a tracking badge and its barcode violated her religious freedoms. The tagging resembled the "mark of the beast," as Hernandez and her father told Info Wars in an interview on October 3.

The school had offered a compromise—a badge without an RFID chip. But when the Hernandez family declined, the administrators informed them in a letter that Andrea would be removed from the magnet school and sent to the high school she was zoned for (which has not yet implemented the RFID program).

On Wednesday, a judge granted the Hernandez family a temporary injunction to prevent the school from expelling Andrea. The Hernandez family is suing for a permanent injunction, and for court-determined damages for violation of their civil liberties.