When the government stops defending civil rights
But in January of this year, shortly after Trump was sworn in, the Department of Energy suddenly froze investigations into thousands of cases of alleged racial and sex discrimination, including the case involving Blunt’s son. Linda McMahon, Trump’s education secretary, lifted the freeze in March. A week later, the Department of Energy announced that it would close seven of OCR’s twelve regional offices and fire about half of its five-hundred-and-fifty employees, as part of a “broader reduction” at the agency. In response, Public Justice, a Washington-based nonprofit legal organization, and attorneys at Glenn Agre Bergman & Fuentes, filed a lawsuit against the Department of Energy, claiming that the drastic cuts would make it impossible for the agency to fulfill its legal obligation to enforce civil rights laws and would deprive children across the country who have been discriminated against “a real path to relief.” One of the plaintiffs in the case was Tara Plante, who had by this point withdrawn her son from public school and enrolled him in a private academy, despite the financial strain this had placed on her family. “I felt like we had no choice — regarding his physical safety and his mental health,” she told me recently. “Every day, he would come home and say, ‘They made fun of my hair,’ ‘They called me that,’ ‘They called me that.’ He would say, ‘My heart hurts,’ or ‘I can’t take it anymore.’”
Victims of racist bullying are not the only children to whom the evisceration of OCR has harmed. The other plaintiff in the Public Justice lawsuit is Karen Jozefowski, a resident of Troy, Michigan, whose ten-year-old son has a severe, potentially life-threatening allergy to dairy products. In 2023, this condition, which was classified as a disability, turned him into a target of abuse and ridicule. “Allergies are stupid!” one student shouted as he poured milk on Josefowski’s son’s lunch. On another occasion, a group of students dropped him on the ground, placed a paper cheese crown on his head, and then taunted him with real cheese. Because her son’s allergies could be triggered by mere contact with dairy products and because the harassment continued despite her complaints, Jozefowski’s pediatrician advised keeping him at home. She decided to take him out of school, then filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights, which handles thousands of disability cases every year. After reviewing the evidence, a thick file of documents compiled by Jozefowski, OCR investigators told her her son’s case was a slam dunk. “They said, ‘Your case is so straightforward, this is one of the easiest cases we’ve ever seen,'” she recalls.
After OCR’s involvement, the school agreed to enter into facilitated mediation. But after Trump’s election, the agency stopped responding to Josefowski’s emails, and mediation efforts stalled. Jozefowski and her husband, Glenn, consulted a private attorney who confirmed what they feared: that the closure of OCR’s regional offices had caused their son’s case to be shelved. (Lawyer Elizabeth Abdel Nour told me that an OCR official told her that “nothing is happening now — we are closed.”) Last spring, Karen Jozefowski, a teacher, started homeschooling her son, which she said has kept him from falling behind academically, but she knows it can’t provide him with the social benefits that attending school can. “He has no community,” she said, crying. She added that her son was so shaken by the harassment that he began trying to hide his sensitivity, which could put his safety at risk. “He was traumatized,” she added.
In May and June, a US district court issued cross-injunctions suspending DOE cuts and directing the reinstatement of fired Office for Civil Rights employees. But the Trump administration delayed compliance with the orders, reinstating only eighty-five of the fired workers while the decisions were appealed. On September 29, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit stayed an injunction specifically related to OCR, citing an emergency order issued by the Supreme Court that granted the Trump administration permission to move forward with broad separations at the Department of Energy. Two weeks ago, OCR’s 85 investigators were laid off and reinstated, including a senior director who described the second firing as a punch in the gut. (On Tuesday, a judge issued a preliminary injunction in a related case, though it remains unclear how the decision will affect the recent wave of OCR terminations.) Like Karen Jozefowski, the senior manager has a son with a disability, and she expressed concern that parents of children like hers may now have no way to protect them from abuse. “My child has been harassed on the basis of his disability in the past,” she said. “I think about what would have happened for him if I had not had the experience that I have. This is what parents will suffer from, especially people who do not have the resources to file a lawsuit. It is the most vulnerable groups that will suffer the most.”
Until recently, complaints investigated by DOE’s Office for Civil Rights came primarily from students and families who contacted the agency of their own volition and reported the harm they had suffered — people like Karen Jozefowski and Tara Plante. Under Trump, the focus has shifted to internally generated investigations, such as the announcement, in March, that forty-five universities across the country would be targeted for “race-exclusive” graduate programs. All of the universities on the list — Duke, Cornell, Emory, and George Mason — were investigated for alleged discrimination white students experienced due to DEI efforts. Recently, the Office for Civil Rights threatened to cut federal funding to public schools in New York, Chicago and Northern Virginia unless they stop giving transgender and nonbinary students access to bathrooms and athletic programs consistent with their identity, which the administration says is a violation of Title IX, the law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded educational programs. (The Fairfax and Arlington County school boards sued the Department of Education in August, noting that several courts had ruled that Title IX requires Give transgender students such access. Their cases were dismissed by a district judge, but the school districts have since appealed the decision.) The administration also launched an unprecedented campaign to punish universities for allegedly failing to combat anti-Semitism on campuses where protests against the war in Gaza took place — accusing them of compromising the safety of Jewish students, who were targeted for protections that members of other groups did not appear to deserve.
The targeted investigations that now dominate the OPR’s agenda are “purely political,” the fired senior director told me. Some conservatives would argue that this agenda exists always It was partisan, shaped by the woke ideology of the Democrats. But is protecting children with disabilities from discrimination really a partisan issue? Or investigate schools that failed to protect teenage girls from abuse? “Achieving a sense of safety in an educational setting is not a partisan issue,” said Amanda Walsh, deputy director of external affairs at the Victims’ Rights Law Center, a nonprofit that represents victims of sexual assault, including students who have experienced Title IX violations such as sexual harassment and violence. (The center is also one of the plaintiffs in the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the Department of Energy.) “Sexual assault is not a partisan issue,” Walsh continued. “The clients we serve are Democrats and Republicans, and most are children and students. I believe the safety of our children in K-12 schools and students on college campuses is one of the few values that many people can agree on.”