Trump's Education Department is backing away from addressing civil rights for Black students

WASHINGTON (AP) — For generations, the federal government enforced civil rights laws with an eye toward remedying historic, systemic discrimination against Black people and other people of color. The Justice Department pressed schools to desegregate. The Education Department worked to promote equal opportunity and held schools accountable for racial bias.

But under the Trump administration, efforts to address deep-rooted inequities for students of color are being cast as discriminatory against white students. Programs that have long withstood legal scrutiny are now quick to be deemed “ illegal DEI ” — diversity, equity and inclusion — by the White House. Schools that do not comply have faced threats to their funding, and in some cases, lost federal grants.

Civil rights attorneys describe the administration’s actions as a complete inversion of legal history.

“It’s literally flipping the purpose of civil rights law on its head, not just harming Black students and students of color, but entire school communities,” said Michael Pillera, director of educational equity issues at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “It’s unmoored from the actual history of our country and untethered to the reality of life in this country.”

The U.S. government has opened investigations or joined litigation over a wide range of efforts to address racial inequality. The Justice Department is investigating programs to increase the number of teachers of color in Rhode Island and Iowa. And grants to districts to train teachers or recruit school mental health workers have been discontinued for mentions of diversity in recruitment.

In a statement, the Education Department said programs receiving federal funding must follow the law, which prohibits discrimination based on race.

“Serving student needs and following the law are not irreconcilable mandates. Advocates and educators have no reason to stress if they abide by the law,” said Amelia Joy, a department spokesperson.

The Trump administration investigated Chicago Public Schools and withheld more than $20 million when the district refused to end its Black Student Success Program, which aims to increase access to advanced coursework for Black students and reduce overly harsh discipline.

A similar effort to close racial achievement gaps in Los Angeles is under the same pressure.

Los Angeles Unified School District created the Black Student Achievement Plan after an outpouring of student activism following the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It supports schools with extra teachers, counselors and curriculum in Black history.

Initially, the district chose schools partially based on the number of Black students enrolled. In 2023, Defending Education, a Virginia-based conservative group, filed a complaint to the Education Department, alleging discrimination against non-Black students. The district said it would no longer consider Black enrollment and instead focus solely on metrics like high absenteeism and low test scores, emphasizing that all students could take part.

After the changes, the Education Department in 2024 said it saw no evidence of a violation. But when Defending Education filed its complaint again this year, the department's Office for Civil Rights launched an investigation.

Sarah Parshall Perry, senior legal fellow at Defending Education, said it refiled the complaint after district leaders were recorded saying the program had not materially changed, despite the new criteria.

“Our goal is not to make LA Unified a target, but rather to make sure that when people say that they are eliminating racially discriminatory aspects of programs, that they’re actually making good on their word,” Perry said.

In a written statement, LAUSD said its programs are aligned with state and federal laws and are open to all students.

Makeda Walker-Deen, a junior at Dorsey High School, said the program has supported her in several ways through high school.

A program counselor directed her toward college preparation programs, which made it possible for her to visit the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford, colleges where she is thinking of applying. Psychologists and social workers she connected with have helped her navigate pressure and anxiety.

“I think that the things a lot of critics are saying are so unreasonable,” she said. “They’re saying that a program that’s meant to help Black students, other students of color, is discriminatory. We’ve been discriminated against in school systems basically our entire lives.”

LAUSD has seen signs of impact. In recent state testing, Black students in the district outperformed the average Black student in California.

“When you provide teachers and school personnel with knowledge and skills to help your lowest performing students, everyone wins,” said Tyrone Howard, an education professor at UCLA who consulted on BSAP.

Organizers worry pressures on the program will slow efforts to address inequities for Black students.

“Where is the uproar about the failings of the public education system for Black children?” said Christian Flagg, director of youth organizing at Community Coalition, which lobbied for the creation of BSAP. “We have had this student group at the bottom for so long, these massive gaps for so long. But when we do something to try to address it, there’s a problem.”

The pivot in the federal government's approach to civil rights in schools has taken several forms under President Donald Trump.

The Justice Department has released school districts from court-ordered desegregation plans dating back to the Civil Rights Movement, describing them as outdated and burdensome. And the Education Department has stripped funding from some districts that used it to create magnet schools intended to be more diverse.

In correspondence discouraging districts' diversity programs, the Trump administration has repeatedly cited a broad interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, which prevented colleges and universities from directly considering race in admissions.

While that ruling pertained only to admissions, the administration last winter notified schools that any differential consideration based on race was unconstitutional. A federal court struck down that guidance last year, but advocates say schools may still preemptively end equity programs to avoid drawing federal scrutiny.

In Los Angeles, the Justice Department has sought to end another racial equity effort.

In the 1970s, courts ordered the district to address the harms of its segregated schools. The case led to a short-lived period where Black students and white students were bused to different schools. The more lasting programs included the district's magnet schools, and a special designation for “Predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian or Other Non-Anglo” schools.

Known as PHBAO, the program offers smaller class sizes and additional parent-teacher conferences when 70% of the students zoned for that school are students of color. The vast majority of district schools qualify.

In January, the conservative 1776 Project Foundation filed a lawsuit challenging the designation, describing it as “a program of overt discrimination against a new minority: White students.” The next month, the Justice Department filed its own complaint and asked to join the lawsuit.

“LAUSD's desegregation program has outlived its usefulness to the point of being unconstitutional,” an assistant U.S. attorney said in a news release.

Decades of inequity show that's not true, said attorney Mark Rosenbaum, who years ago represented kids of color in L.A.'s desegregation case.

“The opponents of desegregation always said, ‘Drop desegregation, and we will put resources into these schools,’” Rosenbaum said. “You know, we are still waiting for that to happen.”

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Makeda Walker-Deen, a junior at Susan Miller Dorsey Senior High School, enters the school in Los Angeles, Thursday, May 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

A backpack belonging to Makeda Walker-Deen, a junior at Susan Miller Dorsey Senior High School, sits on steps in Los Angeles, Thursday, May 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Makeda Walker-Deen, a junior at Susan Miller Dorsey Senior High School, poses for a photo in Los Angeles, Thursday, May 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Makeda Walker-Deen, a junior at Susan Miller Dorsey Senior High School, sits for a photo in Los Angeles, Thursday, May 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Makeda Walker-Deen, a junior at Susan Miller Dorsey Senior High School, stands for a photo in Los Angeles, Thursday, May 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is scrapping plans for a $1.8 billion fund that would have compensated allies of the Republican president, the Justice Department's top official said Tuesday in retreating from a program that faced a fierce political backlash that had threatened to stall key elements of the White House agenda.

“We are not moving forward with the fund, period,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in response to questions at a House hearing on the Justice Department budget.

"Not moving forward ever?” asked Rep. Grace Meng, a New York Democrat.

“Correct,” Blanche answered.

The blunt declaration marked an extraordinary, and rare, Trump administration turnabout in the face of mounting political opposition to a fund that officials said was meant to compensate people who believe they have been improperly targeted by the criminal justice system. Since the establishment of the fund two weeks ago, it’s been paused by a judge and lambasted by Democrats and Republicans alike who said they were troubled by a lack of oversight and the potential for payouts to participants in the violent Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

The furor especially complicated matters in the Senate, where Republicans defiantly left town nearly two weeks ago without passing legislation to fund President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agencies after Democrats said they would offer amendments to scrap or scale back the compensation fund.

Furious, Senate Republicans jettisoned White House security money from the bill and made clear they would not pass the legislation at all unless the administration made major changes to the plan. They had sought reassurances from Blanche before moving forward.

The $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” was established last month to resolve Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns. The Justice Department had said it was an appropriate measure to correct what officials have insisted was the weaponization of federal law enforcement during the Biden administration, when Trump faced criminal charges and several of his allies were investigated and prosecuted.

The administration had said that anyone who felt unfairly persecuted could apply for compensation regardless of political affiliation, but Blanche's refusal to publicly foreclose the possibility that people convicted of crimes of violence in the Jan. 6 riot could get payouts alarmed lawmakers. A five-member commission was to have been responsible for deciding on the payouts, though no commissioners had yet been named and the criteria for eligibility remained unclear.

Blanche made clear Tuesday that he stood behind the rationale for the fund even as he was abandoning its implementation, saying: “This Department of Justice, unfortunately, was weaponized against many, many Americans, and we’re trying every day to to fix it. And we’ve made a lot of progress, but we have a lot more to do.”

Merrick Garland, the attorney general under President Joe Biden, has denied allegations of politicization and said his decisions followed the facts, the evidence and the law. The Justice Department under his leadership investigated prominent Democrats too, most notably by appointing a special counsel to investigate Biden's handling of classified information and another special counsel who brought tax and gun charges against Biden's son Hunter.

As part of the same deal to resolve the tax lawsuit, the IRS agreed to drop any pending probes of Trump over whether he’s paid his fair share of taxes. Pressed over whether it was also abandoning that part of the deal, Blanche said “nothing has changed with that,” and said the administration was only backing away from plans to create the $1.8 billion fund.

Signs of the retreat surfaced Monday when a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press that the Republican president was reconsidering whether to move forward with the fund. The Justice Department said separately it would comply with a Virginia court temporarily blocking the fund, effectively agreeing to pause the plan for at least several weeks.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday that he hoped the White House would move to drop the fund, telling reporters, “I do think the best way to handle it is if the administration decides to shut it down themselves."

The hearing Tuesday before a House Appropriations subcommittee was scheduled for discussion of the Justice Department's budget, but lawmakers quickly focused their questioning on the fund.

“This administration has engaged in what are perhaps the most brazen acts of flagrant corruption I’ve ever seen,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, said before Blanche announced the abandonment of the fund. “And you are at the center of many of them, Mr. Blanche.”

She called the fund “a corrupt payout scheme for the president and his political allies. It is shameful.”

The Justice Department’s efforts to move forward with the fund were also facing headwinds in the courts after several lawsuits filed by Trump critics, including a fired Jan. 6 prosecutor and two police officers who helped defend the Capitol.

On Friday, a federal judge in Virginia halted the fund’s formation and any potential payouts for at least two weeks and scheduled a June 12 hearing for arguments on whether to extend her order. Separately, the judge in Florida overseeing Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS ordered the president’s attorneys to respond to “grievous allegations” by settlement critics that Trump abandoned his claims to avoid the court’s scrutiny of an illegal deal.

Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward — which brought one of the lawsuits — said of Blanche’s comments Tuesday, “If you can say it on TV, you should say it in court.”

Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington contributed to this report.

Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., asks questions following Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, Tuesday, June 2, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Allison Robbert)

Rep. Rosa DeLauro attends Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, Tuesday, June 2, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Allison Robbert)

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testifies before the House Appropriations Committee, Tuesday, June 2, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Allison Robbert)

Staff members hold notes as Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testifies before the House Appropriations Committee, Tuesday, June 2, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Allison Robbert)

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche arrives to testify before the House Appropriations Committee, Tuesday, June 2, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Allison Robbert)

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testifies before the House Appropriations Committee, Tuesday, June 2, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Allison Robbert)

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testifies before the House Appropriations Committee, Tuesday, June 2, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Allison Robbert)

FILE - Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, March 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Gabriela Passos, File)

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testifies during a Senate Committee on Appropriations subcommittee hearing to address the Trump administration's budget request for the Justice Department, Tuesday, May 19, 2026, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche arrives for a closed-door meeting with Republican senators who are expected to abandon a proposal for $1 billion in security money for the White House complex and President Donald Trump's ballroom after it has failed to win enough party support, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, May 21, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks to a reporter outside the White House, Wednesday, May 27, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

FILE - Acting U.S. attorney general Todd Blanche speaks during a news conference at the Justice Department, May 4, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)