Publications

Rewriting Racial Inequality: The State of Civil Rights Law under Trump documents the second Trump administration’s blueprint for radically transforming how the federal government views and enforces civil rights. The new legal order taking shape upends Reconstruction-era understandings of equal protection and related federal statutes while recasting the modern Civil Rights Movement as a defense against anti-white race discrimination. Our close and comprehensive examination of executive orders, enforcement activity and litigation since January 20, 2025, organizes the Trump administration’s approach into four pillars: (1) Redefining racial discrimination, (2) Dismantling the institutional framework for government support of racial equity and cancelling existing investigations, (3) Enforcing policy priorities through defunding and fining institutions, and (4) Encouraging racial gerrymandering of congressional districts in the guise of political gerrymandering.

Under this framework, we explore how the Trump administration has built on prior conservative doctrinal developments in civil rights law to:

• Offer a new interpretation of anti-discrimination based solely on an exaggerated application of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that paints Black and brown people as the grantees of unmeritocratic preference and white people as the victims of discrimination;

• Fire tens of thousands of federal employees and shuttered or incapacitated most federal agencies, offices, and programs focused on civil rights or equity;

• Halt or cancel thousands of civil rights investigations, particularly claims of race discrimination, while prioritizing and opening new investigations for discrimination against white people and antisemitism;

• Terminate, condition or freeze hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to states, universities, rural and low-income schools, nonprofits supporting vulnerable populations, groundbreaking scientific research, and programs explicitly created by Congress, all because they were identified as DEI-related and thus no longer effectuated Trump’s priorities; 

• Present an erroneous legal finding of voter discrimination in order to force a hesitant state legislature to redistrict, resulting in a racial gerrymander.  

As a result, affected individuals, states, organizations, law firms and universities either sought resolution with the administration, hoping to avoid the public and financial costs of litigation, or fought the administration in court. Hundreds of challenges are ongoing in federal district courts throughout the country, with some claims successful in winning back their positions, grants, or constitutional protections, while others, denied relief often because of the Supreme Court, face the long-haul litigation battle. We chronicle these struggles for policymakers, researchers, students and the public at large.

The societal implications of these developments include the stereotyping of Black identity and the abandonment of racial remediation efforts; turmoil in the federal courts and a lack of consistent legal standards; a diminished federal rights infrastructure; and more culture war.

Rewriting Racial Inequality offers a rare focus on issues of racial equality as a fundamental interest, anti-Black racism and the Trump administration’s civil rights playbook at the crossroads of antidiscrimination law. This critical evaluation is intended as a resource and will be updated in six months.

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This report analyzes the compliance challenges public universities face since the issuance of several executive orders that threaten investigation and defunding for a broad range of activities associated with “DEI” and other undefined terms. In Part I, we examine the language of the federal directives in light of universities’ historic obligations and current circumstances. Many institutions have so far chosen some version of either pre-emptive obedience, wait-and-see inaction or offensive defiance. We suggest that institutions will face some combination of four possible courses of action: continue to obey civil rights law, anticipate new standards, manage risks and defend current practices.

Schools’ circumstances are not uniform. Yet all must conform to current legal standards, which are often inconsistent with the new federal policy directives. To clarify, this report sets out the existing state of the law since Students for Fair Admissions, including the scope and limitations of that Supreme Court decision, the continued allowance of race-neutral means to achieve racially diverse learning environments and the applicable tests used by the Court under Title VI. Since many organizations and institutions have already challenged the federal administration in court, we conclude with an analysis of the legal defenses—mostly on First Amendment grounds—that have so far succeeded in securing injunctions against certain banned practices. Part II of this report sets out best practices universities across the United States have used to stay in compliance with civil rights law yet still maintain environments that are diverse, inclusive and consistent with equitable principles.

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