NEW YORK – Three Muslim women, who were ordered to remove their hijab for mugshots, would be paid $60,000 each after a Brooklyn federal court ordered New York City to compensate them for violating their rights.

“We did our best to establish a good precedent. On the one hand, it gives officers guidance, and on the other hand, it protects the exercise of religious freedom,” Tahanie Aboushi, the lawyer, told New York Post.

According to court filings, New York police issued an order in March 2015 changing the policies regarding people who refuse to take off their religious head coverings, The New York Daily News reported on Tuesday.

The first case of the three dates back to 2012, when a high school girl – identified as GE – was arrested after a brawl with two other girls whom she thought spread gossip about her.

GE was arrested and brought to a local police station where she was asked to take off her hijab. When she refused, she was taken to a secluded room where a female police officer was supposed to take her photo.

At Brooklyn Central Booking, the police could not accommodate the girl’s religious needs, telling her that there weren’t any female officers available and that the camera is in a fixed spot, thus the mugshot couldn’t be taken in a private room.

Therefore, the male officer then captured her photo without a hijab, making her feel “exposed, violated and distraught” as she was forced to be without the veil for 20 minutes while male officers and prisoners looked at her.

The two other cases were filed in 2015 and 2016 by G.E.’s lawyer, Aboushi, and involved a similar situation where one woman claims to have been forced to remove her veil at Brooklyn Central Booking police station and was denied a female photographer.

The third accuser said her hijab was removed at the scene of her arrest.