Justice Dept. Seeks to Pare Again Civil Rights Protections for Minorities

The Trump administration has long sought to remove protections for groups at risk of such effects, arguing that the civil rights law passed by Congress only protects against willful acts of discrimination.

The administration had taken legal objections from conservative allies, including the influential Heritage Foundation, and placed the ordinance on a list of anti-discrimination laws advocated by the Obama administration, whose provisions it would revise after President Trump won a second term.

“Federal agencies are full of guidelines that take the multiple impact approach and the Trump administration needs to stamp them out,” wrote Roger Clegg, former president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank, in The National Review Year 2018.

The Trump administration has already signaled its objections to the concept and has taken steps to undermine it.

In 2017, the government closed a complaint from civil rights groups, including the NAACP Legal Protection and Education Fund, on the grounds that Republican Governor Larry Hogan’s cancellation of a major transportation project in Maryland called Red Line violated civil rights Act, because it disproportionately hurts the city’s black residents. The transportation department put the complaint, which opened on the last day of the Obama administration, on hold with no result or explanation.

The ordinance’s fiercest condemnation came in 2018, when the Trump administration essentially accused an Obama-era guidance document addressing the disproportionate disciplinary rates among black children in the U.S. for the mass shooting of a troubled white student in Parkland Fla.

Trump administration officials tried extensively to tie the document to the doctrine of different effects. In the days leading up to the revocation of the document by the Ministries of Education and Justice in December 2018, a federal school safety commission, led by Education Minister Betsy DeVos, published a report recommending that the guidelines be withdrawn because they are “based on different legal theory , but this theory lacks a foundation in applicable law. “It called the reading of the document of the law” at best dubious “.