• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
MENUMENU
MENUMENU
  • Home
  • About
    • Contact Us
    • FlaglerLive Board of Directors
    • Comment Policy
    • Mission Statement
    • Our Values
    • Privacy Policy
  • Live Calendar
  • Submit Obituary
  • Submit an Event
  • Support FlaglerLive
  • Advertise on FlaglerLive (386) 503-3808
  • Search Results

FlaglerLive

No Bull, no Fluff, No Smudges

MENUMENU
  • Flagler
    • Flagler County Commission
    • Beverly Beach
    • Economic Development Council
    • Flagler History
    • Mondex/Daytona North
    • The Hammock
    • Tourist Development Council
  • Palm Coast
    • Palm Coast City Council
    • Palm Coast Crime
  • Bunnell
    • Bunnell City Commission
    • Bunnell Crime
  • Flagler Beach
    • Flagler Beach City Commission
    • Flagler Beach Crime
  • Cops/Courts
    • Circuit & County Court
    • Florida Supreme Court
    • Federal Courts
    • Flagler 911
    • Fire House
    • Flagler County Sheriff
    • Flagler Jail Bookings
    • Traffic Accidents
  • Rights & Liberties
    • Fourth Amendment
    • First Amendment
    • Privacy
    • Second Amendment
    • Seventh Amendment
    • Sixth Amendment
    • Sunshine Law
    • Third Amendment
    • Religion & Beliefs
    • Human Rights
    • Immigration
    • Labor Rights
    • 14th Amendment
    • Civil Rights
  • Schools
    • Adult Education
    • Belle Terre Elementary
    • Buddy Taylor Middle
    • Bunnell Elementary
    • Charter Schools
    • Daytona State College
    • Flagler County School Board
    • Flagler Palm Coast High School
    • Higher Education
    • Imagine School
    • Indian Trails Middle
    • Matanzas High School
    • Old Kings Elementary
    • Rymfire Elementary
    • Stetson University
    • Wadsworth Elementary
    • University of Florida/Florida State
  • Economy
    • Jobs & Unemployment
    • Business & Economy
    • Development & Sprawl
    • Leisure & Tourism
    • Local Business
    • Local Media
    • Real Estate & Development
    • Taxes
  • Commentary
    • The Conversation
    • Pierre Tristam
    • Diane Roberts
    • Guest Columns
    • Byblos
    • Editor's Blog
  • Culture
    • African American Cultural Society
    • Arts in Palm Coast & Flagler
    • Books
    • City Repertory Theatre
    • Flagler Auditorium
    • Flagler Playhouse
    • Flagler Youth Orchestra
    • Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra
    • Palm Coast Arts Foundation
    • Special Events
  • Elections 2024
    • Amendments and Referendums
    • Presidential Election
    • Campaign Finance
    • City Elections
    • Congressional
    • Constitutionals
    • Courts
    • Governor
    • Polls
    • Voting Rights
  • Florida
    • Federal Politics
    • Florida History
    • Florida Legislature
    • Florida Legislature
    • Ron DeSantis
  • Health & Society
    • Flagler County Health Department
    • Ask the Doctor Column
    • Health Care
    • Health Care Business
    • Covid-19
    • Children and Families
    • Medicaid and Medicare
    • Mental Health
    • Poverty
    • Violence
  • All Else
    • Daily Briefing
    • Americana
    • Obituaries
    • News Briefs
    • Weather and Climate
    • Wildlife

Trump Administration Quietly Rolls Back Civil Rights Efforts Across Federal Government

June 17, 2017 | FlaglerLive | 16 Comments

Detail from a sculpture outside the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. (© FlaglerLive)
Detail from a sculpture outside the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. (© FlaglerLive)

For decades, the Department of Justice has used court-enforced agreements to protect civil rights, successfully desegregating school systems, reforming police departments, ensuring access for the disabled and defending the religious.


Now, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the DOJ appears to be turning away from this storied tool, called consent decrees. Top officials in the DOJ civil rights division have issued verbal instructions through the ranks to seek settlements without consent decrees — which would result in no continuing court oversight.

The move is just one part of a move by the Trump administration to limit federal civil rights enforcement. Other departments have scaled back the power of their internal divisions that monitor such abuses. In a previously unreported development, the Education Department last week reversed an Obama-era reform that broadened the agency’s approach to protecting rights of students. The Labor Department and the Environmental Protection Agency have also announced sweeping cuts to their enforcement.

“At best, this administration believes that civil rights enforcement is superfluous and can be easily cut. At worst, it really is part of a systematic agenda to roll back civil rights,” said Vanita Gupta, the former acting head of the DOJ’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama.

Consent decrees have not been abandoned entirely by the DOJ, a person with knowledge of the instructions said. Instead, there is a presumption against their use — attorneys should default to using settlements without court oversight unless there is an unavoidable reason for a consent decree. The instructions came from the civil rights division’s office of acting Assistant Attorney General Tom Wheeler and Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Gore. There is no written policy guidance.

Devin O’Malley, a spokesperson for the DOJ, declined to comment for this story.

Consent decrees can be a powerful tool, and spell out specific steps that must be taken to remedy the harm. These are agreed to by both parties and signed off on by a judge, whom the parties can appear before again if the terms are not being met. Though critics say the DOJ sometimes does not enforce consent decrees well enough, they are more powerful than settlements that aren’t overseen by a judge and have no built-in enforcement mechanism.

Such settlements have “far fewer teeth to ensure adequate enforcement,” Gupta said.

Consent decrees often require agencies or municipalities to take expensive steps toward reform. Local leaders and agency heads then can point to the binding court authority when requesting budget increases to ensure reforms. Without consent decrees, many localities or government departments would simply never make such comprehensive changes, said William Yeomans, who spent 26 years at the DOJ, mostly in the civil rights division.

“They are key to civil rights enforcement,” he said. “That’s why Sessions and his ilk don’t like them.”

Some, however, believe the Obama administration relied on consent decrees too often and sometimes took advantage of vulnerable cities unable to effectively defend themselves against a well-resourced DOJ.

“I think a recalibration would be welcome,” said Richard Epstein, a professor at New York University School of Law and a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, adding that consent decrees should be used in cases where clear, systemic issues of discrimination exist.

Though it’s too early to see how widespread the effect of the changes will be, the Justice Department appears to be adhering to the directive already.

On May 30, the DOJ announced Bernards Township in New Jersey had agreed to pay $3.25 million to settle an accusation it denied zoning approval for a local Islamic group to build a mosque. Staff attorneys at the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey initially sought to resolve the case with a consent decree, according to a spokesperson for Bernards Township. But because of the DOJ’s new stance, the terms were changed after the township protested, according to a person familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office declined comment.

Sessions has long been a public critic of consent decrees. As a senator, he wrote they “constitute an end run around the democratic process.” He lambasted local agencies that seek them out as a way to inflate their budgets, a “particularly offensive” use of consent decrees that took decision-making power from legislatures.

On March 31, Sessions ordered a sweeping review of all consent decrees with troubled police departments nationwide to ensure they were in line with the Trump administration’s law-and-order goals. Days before, the DOJ had asked a judge to postpone a hearing on a consent decree with the Baltimore Police Department that had been arranged during the last days of the Obama administration. The judge denied that request, and the consent decree has moved forward.

The DOJ has already come under fire from critics for altering its approach to voting rights cases. After nearly six years of litigation over Texas’ voter ID law — which Obama DOJ attorneys said was written to intentionally discriminate against minority voters and had such a discriminatory effect — the Trump DOJ abruptly withdrew its intent claims in late February.

Attorneys who worked on the case for years were barely consulted about the change — many weren’t consulted at all, according to two former DOJ officials with knowledge of the matter. Gore wrote the filing changing the DOJ’s position largely by himself and asked the attorneys who’d been involved in the case for years to sign it to show continuity. Not all of the attorneys fell in line. Avner Shapiro — who has been a prosecutor in the civil rights division for more than 20 years — left his name off the filings written by Gore. Shapiro was particularly involved in developing the DOJ’s argument that Texas had intentionally discriminated against minorities in crafting its voter ID legislation.

“That’s the ultimate act of rebellion,” Yeomans, the former civil rights division prosecutor, said. A rare act, removing one’s name from a legal filing is one of the few ways career attorneys can express public disagreement with an administration.

Gore has no history of bringing civil rights cases. A former partner at the law firm Jones Day, he has instead defended states against claims of racial gerrymandering and represented North Carolina when the state was sued over its controversial “bathroom bill,” which requires transgender people to use the facility that matched their birth gender.

All of the internal changes at the DOJ have left attorneys and staff with “a great deal of fear and uncertainty,” said Yeomans. While he says the lawyers there would like to stay at the department, they fear Sessions’ priorities will have devastating impact on their work.

The DOJ’s civil rights office is not alone in fearing rollbacks in enforcement. Across federal departments, the Trump administration has made moves to diminish the power of civil rights divisions.

The Department of Education has laid out plans to loosen requirements on investigations into civil rights complaints, according to an internal memo sent to staff on June 8 and obtained by ProPublica.

Under the Obama administration, the department’s office for civil rights applied an expansive approach to investigations. Individual complaints related to complex issues such as school discipline, sexual violence and harassment, equal access to educational resources, or racism at a single school might have prompted broader probes to determine whether the allegations were part of a pattern of discrimination or harassment.

The new memo, sent by Candice Jackson, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, to regional directors at the department’s civil rights office, trims this approach. Jackson was appointed deputy assistant secretary for the office in April and will remain as the acting head of the office until the Senate confirms a full-time assistant secretary. Trump has not publicly nominated anyone for the role yet.

The office will apply the broader approach “only” if the original allegations raise systemic concerns or the investigative team argues for it, Jackson wrote in the memo.

As part of the new approach, the Education Department will no longer require civil rights investigators to obtain three years of complaint data from a specific school or district to assess compliance with civil rights law.

Critics contend the Obama administration’s probes were onerous. The office “did such a thorough review of everything that the investigations were demanding and very expensive” for schools, said Boston College American politics professor R. Shep Melnick, adding that the new approach could take some regulatory pressure off schools and districts.

But some civil rights leaders believe the change could undermine the office’s mission. This narrowing of the department’s investigations “is stunning to me and dangerous,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s civil rights office from August 2013 until January 2017 and currently chairs the United States Commission on Civil Rights. “It’s important to take an expansive view of the potential for harm because if you look only at the most recent year, you won’t necessarily see the pattern,” said Lhamon.

The department’s new directive also gives more autonomy to regional offices, no longer requiring oversight or review of some cases by department headquarters, according to the memo.

The Education Department did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has also proposed cutting over 40 positions from the civil rights office. With reduced staff, the office will have to “make difficult choices, including cutting back on initiating proactive investigations,” according to the department’s proposed budget.

Elsewhere, Trump administration appointees have launched similar initiatives. In its 2018 fiscal plan, the Labor Department has proposed dissolving the office that handles discrimination complaints. Similarly, new leadership at the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed entirely eliminating the environmental justice program, which addresses concerns that almost exclusively impact minority communities. The Washington Post reports the plan transfers all environmental justice work to the Office of Policy, which provides policy and regulatory guidance across the agency.

Mustafa Ali, a former EPA senior adviser and assistant associate administrator for environmental justice who served more than 20 years, quit the agency in protest days before the plan was announced. In his resignation letter, widely circulated in the media, Ali suggested the new leadership was abandoning “those who need our help most.”

–Jessica Huseman and Annie Waldman, with contributed reporting from Ryan Gabrielson.

If you have any information about civil rights enforcement at the Department of Justice, contact [email protected]. If you have any information about civil rights enforcement at the Department of Education, contact [email protected]. You can also reach us on Signal. Here are our Signal contacts and a guide for how to leak to ProPublica.

Support FlaglerLive's End of Year Fundraiser
Thank you readers for getting us to--and past--our year-end fund-raising goal yet again. It’s a bracing way to mark our 15th year at FlaglerLive. Our donors are just a fraction of the 25,000 readers who seek us out for the best-reported, most timely, trustworthy, and independent local news site anywhere, without paywall. FlaglerLive is free. Fighting misinformation and keeping democracy in the sunshine 365/7/24 isn’t free. Take a brief moment, become a champion of fearless, enlightening journalism. Any amount helps. We’re a 501(c)(3) non-profit news organization. Donations are tax deductible.  
You may donate openly or anonymously.
We like Zeffy (no fees), but if you prefer to use PayPal, click here.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Ben Dover says

    June 17, 2017 at 6:41 pm

    man, this article gave me the sniffles, and gas too!!

  2. JasonB says

    June 18, 2017 at 4:57 am

    I get it, when Trump said we would get tired of winning, he was only referring to rich, white men.

  3. Bc. says

    June 18, 2017 at 6:52 am

    That’s a lot of bull.

  4. Sw says

    June 18, 2017 at 8:25 am

    Obstruction of Justice lol

  5. Bill says

    June 18, 2017 at 9:15 am

    Another positive step to reducing federal involvement in local issues.

  6. Pcbest says

    June 18, 2017 at 10:16 am

    YES! Keep up the good work Mr. President!

  7. Shark says

    June 18, 2017 at 11:00 am

    This clown will sign anything !!!

  8. Shark says

    June 18, 2017 at 11:02 am

    An obvious undesirable !!!!

  9. Patrick says

    June 18, 2017 at 6:52 pm

    I was told this awhile back there are two only two types of republicans realy Rich and ignorant !

  10. Flatsflyer says

    June 19, 2017 at 4:17 am

    Lock him and his entire family up until they can be deported or hung after a trial for running the largest criminal enterprise in the history of the United States. A Trump family picture should be added to Webster’s helping to further define Assholes.

  11. Veteran says

    June 19, 2017 at 12:21 pm

    But the Clinton criminal empire is OK????

  12. a tiny manatee says

    June 20, 2017 at 8:36 am

    Dunno veteran, i think the systematic elimination of civil rights might be a bit of a priority over, say, unsubstantiated rumors shilled out by alex jones. But to each their own i guess, some people care about america and some people choose russia over america.

  13. Sherry says

    June 21, 2017 at 1:06 pm

    Please cite “FACTUAL EVIDENCE” of Hillary Clinton’s “criminal empire”!

    Right on, Tiny Manatee!

  14. Mike B says

    June 24, 2017 at 7:41 am

    Go Trump Go!

  15. GeorgeMocambolos says

    June 24, 2017 at 12:13 pm

    I don’t see why people are upset. Trump is doing the same thing the Reagan administration did- cutting back on civil rights enforcement, like the EEOC cutbacks that left a backlog measured in YEARS at that agency. Right wingers have wanted to do such things for years and have always weakened civil rights when they had the chance. This is why so many shifted to the Republican Party under the “southern strategy” beginning with Barry Goldwater, who actively courted white segregationists and their sympathizers, and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other similar measures before and after that legislation. Trump is just the latest incarnation, and his own properties discriminated against black people in the 1960s and 1970s as federal court documents show. So what else is new?

  16. Bill Myers says

    June 25, 2017 at 9:13 am

    Consent decrees were a back door, unethical system to finance leftist organizations. President Trump did the right thing.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Conner Bosch law attorneys lawyers offices palm coast flagler county
  • grand living realty
  • politis matovina attorneys for justice personal injury law auto truck accidents

Primary Sidebar

  • grand living realty
  • politis matovina attorneys for justice personal injury law auto truck accidents

Recent Comments

  • Ray W, on The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, May 27, 2025
  • mm on Don’t Buy the False Narrative that Palm Coast’s Infrastructure Isn’t Keeping Up with Growth
  • Pogo on At Flagler Tiger Bay, Ex-US Attorney General Gives Bullish View of ‘Unitary’ Executive Power, With Nod to Calvin Coolidge
  • Kennan on Why the Far Right Fabricated the Myth of a Migrant ‘Invasion’
  • Sherry on Democracy’s Sunset: There’s a 70% Chance the Constitution Will Be Suspended Before 2028
  • Sherry on The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, May 27, 2025
  • Ray W, on Why the Far Right Fabricated the Myth of a Migrant ‘Invasion’
  • Ray W, on Why the Far Right Fabricated the Myth of a Migrant ‘Invasion’
  • DaleL on No, Race Is Not a ‘Biological Reality’
  • Deborah Coffey on Why You Fall for Fake Health Information
  • The dude on Why You Fall for Fake Health Information
  • c on At Flagler Tiger Bay, Ex-US Attorney General Gives Bullish View of ‘Unitary’ Executive Power, With Nod to Calvin Coolidge
  • William Moya on At Flagler Tiger Bay, Ex-US Attorney General Gives Bullish View of ‘Unitary’ Executive Power, With Nod to Calvin Coolidge
  • James on At Flagler Tiger Bay, Ex-US Attorney General Gives Bullish View of ‘Unitary’ Executive Power, With Nod to Calvin Coolidge
  • Deborah Coffey on At Flagler Tiger Bay, Ex-US Attorney General Gives Bullish View of ‘Unitary’ Executive Power, With Nod to Calvin Coolidge
  • Deborah Coffey on Solemnity and Dissonance at Palm Coast’s Memorial Day Ceremony as Congressman Invokes 1.2 Million Casualties

Log in