Jan Resseger is a wonderful woman who spent most of her career advocating for social justice on behalf of the United Church of Christ. She is now retired but she never stops caring and acting. Here she summarizes the Trump administration’s accelerated retreat from enforcing civil rights laws.

One hint about Trump’s view of civil rights was his appointment of Harmeet K. Dhillon to lead the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Dhillon is a prominent opponent of civil rights and has litigated many cases to oppose policies that she believes are unfair to white men.

She wrote recently:

Nothing, except growing tariffs and the failure to mitigate the damage of the wars in Gaza and the Ukraine, has defined Donald Trump’s second term more than the administration’s attempt to undermine civil rights protection for students and educators in our nation’s 13,000 public school districts and the nation’s colleges and universities.

We watched an attack on Maine’s public schools where trans students compete in women’s sports. We watched the Department of Education withhold funds from the Chicago Public Schools because the district has a Black student student success plan that promotes what the Trump administration considers the dangerous principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And just this week, Education Week reported that the Department of Education is cancelling many grants for Full Service Community Schools and the Promise Neighborhoods program where funds are being spent on services the Trump administration believes promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Many of the Department of Education’s efforts to curtail the protection of the civil rights of historically marginalized groups of students have been temporarily stayed by Federal District Courts, but a lot of these cases linger in temporary, local decisions without any legal resolution.

Some colleges and universities have felt enough pressure that they’ve signed agreements to share with the federal government admissions information including high school grades, test scores and family income of all applicants to prove they are not selecting their students based on proxy data that substitutes for race-based affirmative action. Others have lost federal research grants as a punishment for maintaining programs and policies the Trump administration believes promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and thereby discriminate against the white majority.

Is there any chance the Trump administration’s effort to stamp out civil rights will wind down in 2026?  Here are three events in December that indicate the attacks are likely to continue.

The Trump administration just ended the disparate impact test in civil rights enforcement.  For years the federal government has held schools accountable when data proves, for example, their discipline systems are discriminatory by race or ethnicity or disability status. Evidence of disparate impact has been used for decades to protect students and others from discrimination in institutions that receive government funding including education, law enforcement and fair housing. But that ended abruptly on Wednesday, December 9.

The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler reported: “(T)he Justice Department moved Tuesday to kill a decades-old provision of civil rights law that allows statistical disparities to be used as proof of racial discrimination. The new regulations reinterpret a key plank of the Civil Rights Act and were issued without an opportunity for public comment, which is unusual for major regulatory action… Conservatives have long argued that proving discrimination should require proof that someone intended to treat people differently. And they say that when people are being judged by data, they feel pressure to make decisions based on racial quotas. In that way, the Trump administration argues, a policy meant to fight discrimination is actually fostering it… Supporters of disparate impact analysis say it is a critical tool because finding ‘smoking gun’ evidence to prove someone intended to discriminate is difficult.” Meckler notes that the way the new guidance was immediately implemented breaks federal precedent: “Federal agencies typically would allow time for public comment before publishing a final rule like this.”

Politico adds that Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump Justice Department’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, provided her particular justification for stamping out the disparate impact test: “Harmeet Dhillon, DOJ’s civil rights chief, highlighted that the rule change will lead to fewer civil rights lawsuits…. The prior ‘disparate impact’ regulations encouraged people to file lawsuits challenging racially neutral policies, without evidence of intentional discrimination… Our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions.”

By contrast, last spring when President Trump released an executive order trying to end “disparate impact,” the NY Times Erica Green considered disparate impact’s role in the history of enforcement of the Civil Rights Act: “The disparate impact test has been crucial to enforcing key portions of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. For decades, it has been relied upon by the government and attorneys to root out discrimination in areas of employment, housing, policing, education and more. Civil rights prosecutors say the disparate-impact test is one of their most important tools for uncovering discrimination because it shows how a seemingly neutral policy or law has different outcomes for different demographic groups, revealing inequities.”

Trump’s DOJ just sued Minneapolis Public Schools to end the district’s effort to increase the number of teachers of color.  The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Anthony Lonetree reported last week: “The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit against Minneapolis Public Schools, accusing the state’s third-largest district of providing discriminatory protections to teachers of color in layoff and reassignment decisions.  The lawsuit… marks the latest salvo against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives—in this case, the district’s efforts to bolster its minority teaching ranks. At issue is a contract agreement with educators that includes language shielding teachers of color from ‘last-in, first-out’ layoff practices and prioritizing the hiring of Black male educators at a north Minneapolis elementary school.”

Lonetree quotes Attorney General Pam Bondi justifying the lawsuit: “Discrimination is unacceptable in all forms especially when it comes to hiring decisions… Our public education system in Minnesota and across the country must be a bastion of merit and equal opportunity—not DEI.”  Here are words from DOJ’s lawsuit itself: “While defendants claim that these provisions are to stop discrimination, they require defendants to blatantly discriminate against teachers based on their race, color, sex, and national origin.”

Lonetree explains the purpose of the school district’s hiring policy: “Students of color comprise nearly two-thirds of the district’s total student population, and Minneapolis Public Schools, like many districts around the state, has sought to place teachers whom students can relate to and aspire to be like.”

Is the Trump Department of Education making the Office for Civil Rights viable again? Will the December 5th recall of furloughed staff help families who have filed civil rights complaints?  After a year of massive layoffs and the closure of seven of the twelve regional offices of the Office for Civil Rights, for CNN last week, Sunlen Serfaty described what might have seemed like exciting news: “Beleaguered employees in the civil rights office got what they thought was welcome news last week. The Department of Education informed employees who had been terminated earlier this year, then placed on administrative leave in an ongoing court battle, that they are to return to work later this month. The email to about 250 employees noted they are needed to address the existing caseload.”

However, in the details in the Department of Education’s December 5th recall notice, there are some serious questions about what is happening: For the Associated Press, Collin Binkley explains: “The Trump administration is bringing back dozens of Education Department staffers who were slated to be laid off, saying their help is needed to tackle a mounting backlog of discrimination complaints from students and families. The staffers had been on administrative leave while the department faced lawsuits challenging layoffs in the agency’s Office for Civil Rights, which investigates possible discrimination in the nation’s schools and colleges. But in a Friday (December 5) letter, department officials ordered the workers back to duty starting Dec. 15 to help clear civil rights cases.”  (The emphasis is mine.)

And K-12 Dive‘s Anna Merod quotes Julie Hartman, the Office for Civil Rights’ press secretary for legal affairs emphasizing “in a Dec. 8 email that… (the agency) is  temporarily bringing back OCR staff from administrative leave starting Dec. 15.” (The emphasis is mine.)

Let’s be clear. The Office for Civil Rights has never enforced the 1964 Civil Rights Act merely by charging school districts with violations, getting court orders that school district staff be fired, or imposing fines. OCR’s staff have been known for decades to work with school district teachers, counselors and administrators to develop programs and policies ensuring that children’s civil rights are no longer violated.

There is currently a serious problem at the Office for Civil Rights because all year while more than half the agency’s staff have been laid off, a huge backlog of uninvestigated complaints has built up. Reporters confirm that 2,500 complaints await investigation. NPR’s Cory Turner reports: “(P)ublic data show that OCR has reached resolution agreements in 73 cases involving alleged disability discrimination. Compare that to 2024, when OCR resolved 390, or 2017, the year Trump took office during his first term, when OCR reached agreements in more than 1,000 cases.”  CNN‘s Serfaty adds that this year  OCR has been “dismissing cases at an increasing pace, court documents reveal. About 7,000 cases have been dismissed under the Trump administration—hundreds more than in the same period last year under Biden.”

All this makes one question whether the furloughed staff are really being recalled to work with school districts to overcome the issues that have stimulated 2,500 complaints filed by families. Kimberly Richey emphasized that the recall of staff on leave is temporary, that the e-mail to staff emphasized the need to clear the backlog of complaints.  What percentage of the complaints processed by returning staff will be pursued with efforts to mitigate civil rights problems, and what percentage will be merely dismissed without further work?

There are additional questions about how utterly temporary the recall of staff might actually be. It is important to recall that Congress passed a continuing resolution to end the October government shutdown and also to delay the massive staff firings launched during the shutdown  by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.  That continuing resolution ends on January 30, 2026.  Are staff at OCR being recalled to work from December 15, 2025 only until January 30, 2026, when they will be permanently terminated?

The future of civil rights enforcement by the Trump administration continues to look bleak. Will the OCR be shut down? Will its work be shunted to the Department of Justice as Linda McMahon continues to dismantle the Department of Education?  The Trump administration has persisted in abandoning what have been—for 71 years since Brown v. Board of Education—historic efforts to expand educational opportunity for groups of children who were historically marginalized.  As 2025 ends, the attack on academic freedom and civil rights does not seem to be winding down.