UPDATE - Rewriting Racial Equality: The State of Civil Rights Law under Trump

Anna Griffith

May 2026

This Update documents the Trump Administration's continued efforts to rewrite the meaning of racial equality in the United States. The administration’s efforts have kept pace with their first ten months, collected for CLiME’s November 2025 report presented as a four-pronged strategy aimed at: 

• Redefining race discrimination through a theory of antidiscrimination doctrine developed by the overwhelmingly white conservative legal movement, which has resisted racial progress through the courts since the at least the 1970s;

• Dismantling the federal institutions responsible for civil rights enforcement by eliminating people and offices committed to the work of restorative justice and racial equity and repopulating those spaces with a sparse few ideological loyalists who selectively enforce civil rights laws through this redefined, ahistorical understanding of antidiscrimination;

• Enforcing this colorblind, reverse-race discrimination ideology by weaponizing the federal checkbook to coerce institutions into ideological compliance and to defund any program or research that may document ongoing, system racial inequalities or support Black, Latino and Indigenous communities in any way; and

• White washing racial gerrymandering efforts through political gerrymandering, while the Court ends the Voting Rights Act as we know it by subverting claims of racial discrimination to achieve policy goals–the effects of which often involve civil rights retrenchment–all the while knowing that the Supreme Court is ideologically and doctrinally aligned.

This is the second of two evaluations, and will be updated again for Fall 2026. Read the November 2025 report here.

Read the update below:

UPDATE - Rewriting Racial Equality: The State of Civil Rights Law under Trump

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