The Justice Department terminated more than a dozen decades-old school desegregation cases without asking courts to first review whether the district successfully ended past discriminatory practices, a watchdog group found.
A new analysis released by Civil Rights Red Lines, a Democracy Forward watchdog project run by a former Justice Department lawyer, examines a list of more than 50 school desegregation cases that the Justice Department recently announced it would dismiss.
The review found that since President Trump took office in January 2025, the Justice Department has Support dismissal of case In at least 56 school districts, the motions to terminate were either formally withdrawn or not opposed.
In at least 18 of those cases, the Justice Department upheld dismissals without first asking the federal court in charge of the case to determine whether the school district had achieved “unified status.”
The term, as defined by the Supreme Court, means the school district has eliminated traces of past discrimination that were the subject of the case. The six core areas that courts typically review are student assignments, faculty assignments, staff assignments, transportation, facilities and extracurricular activities, but other areas may be considered.
The group said the case in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, was one of those dismissed without determining whether unified status had been achieved.
In this case, discrimination continued for decades at the school, prompting the Justice Department to propose a new agreement in 2024, which was rejected by the school board.
However, after Trump took office, the Justice Department changed its position and joined the school board in dismissing the case. A U.S. District Court judge declined to do so, saying they would have to prove the schools had achieved unified status.
But the school board appealed the ruling and the case was ultimately dismissed.
“The Department of Justice’s disgraceful withdrawal of resources from these cases and investigations highlights how this administration has abandoned communities across the country,” said Megan Marks, deputy director and editor-in-chief of Civil Rights Red Lines and a former deputy chief of the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division.
“Leaving them doesn’t mean discrimination is solved. It just means the Department of Justice is no longer paying attention,” she added.
CBS News has reached out to the Justice Department for comment on the findings.
At the end of Reconstruction, many states—particularly in the Deep South—enacted so-called “Jim Crow laws” that enforced racial segregation in public facilities. These laws stem from an 1896 Supreme Court decision called Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the “separate but equal” doctrine that allowed racial segregation.
In these states, black children are forced to attend separate schools that often lack adequate resources and are not easily accessible by public transportation.
In 1954, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in the civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education, overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine and outlawing discrimination on the basis of race in public schools.
In the decades since that decision, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has frequently filed legal actions to protect students from unlawful racial discrimination through court-supervised consent decrees with those school districts. Some of these consent decrees have been in effect for decades, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s.
In some cases, Justice Department agreements require school districts to change the way they assign students to different schools or modify other policies to prevent racial segregation of students.
As of May 2022, the Justice Department was still representing the federal government in approximately 140 school desegregation cases, according to an archived news release.
Before the Justice Department announced in September that it was dismissing more than 50 cases, it had publicly moved to dismiss cases in only a handful of locations: Dyersburg, Tennessee; Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana; Hendry County, Florida; and Copiah County, Mississippi.
However, the Justice Department has not publicly released a list of all dismissed cases.
Civil Rights Red Line attempts to withdraw all relevant cases from federal cases across the country and conducts an analysis of the status of those cases and how they were terminated.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon in September called the consent decrees “onerous and outdated” and said the long-term federal oversight of the cases “does not reflect the reality in these classrooms today.”
“This administration’s politicized approach to civil rights enforcement imposes real costs on individuals and entire communities, weakening the protections that underpin equal treatment for all and the rule of law,” Reagan Rush, former chief of the Civil Rights Division’s Special Litigation Section and now director and editor of Civil Rights Red Lines, said Thursday.