Urban League declares a ‘state of emergency' for civil rights in the US in response to Trump
The report, to be released Thursday at the group's conference in Cleveland, Ohio, criticizes the administration for downsizing federal agencies and programs that enforce civil rights policies. The authors aimed to highlight what they saw as a multiyear, coordinated effort by conservative legal activists, lawmakers and media personalities to undermine civil rights policy and create a political landscape that would enable a hard-right agenda on a range of social and economic policy.
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'It is not random. It is a well-funded, well-organized, well-orchestrated movement of many, many years,' said Marc Morial, president of the Urban League. 'For a long time, people saw white supremacist politics and white nationalism as on the fringe of American politics. It has now become the mainstream of the American right, whose central foundation is within the Republican Party.'
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The report directly critiques Project 2025, a sweeping blueprint for conservative governance coordinated by The Heritage Foundation think tank. Project 2025 advised approaches to federal worker layoffs, immigration enforcement and the congressional and legislative branches similar to the Trump administration's current strategy.
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The Urban League report condemns major corporations, universities and top law firms for reversing diversity, equity and inclusion policies. It also criticizes social media companies like Meta and X for purported 'censorship' of Black activists and creatives and content moderation policies that allegedly enabled 'extremists' to spread 'radicalizing' views.
Debates over civil rights enter the center of the political fray
The Trump administration has said many policies implemented by both Democratic and Republican administrations are discriminatory and unconstitutional, arguing that acknowledgments of race and federal and corporate policies that seek to address disparities between different demographics are themselves discriminatory. Trump has signed executive orders banning 'illegal discrimination' and promoting 'merit based opportunity.'
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said civil rights groups that oppose the administration 'aren't advancing anything but hate and division, while the president is focused on uniting our country.'
The report, meanwhile, calls for the creation of a 'new resistance' to counter the administration's agenda. Morial urged other organizations to rally to that cause.
The Urban League and other civil rights groups have repeatedly sued the Trump administration since January. Liberal legal groups and Democratic lawmakers similarly sued over parts of the administration's agenda.
Veteran civil rights activists, Black civic leaders, former federal officials, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and seven members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, contributed to the text.
Raoul said that civil rights allies have felt 'on the defense' in recent years but that now 'it's time to act affirmatively.' For instance, if rollbacks of DEI policies result in discrimination against women or people of color legal action could follow, he warned.
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'It all depends on how they do it. We're going to be watching,' he said. 'And just because the Trump administration doesn't believe in disparate impact anymore doesn't mean the rest of the universe must believe that.'
The report criticizes the Trump administration's efforts to shutter the Education Department, and denounces changes to programs meant to support communities of color at the departments of Commerce, Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development, among others. The transformation of the Justice Department'scivil rights division was singled out as 'an existential threat to civil rights enforcement.'
The Justice Department pointed to its published civil rights policy and a social media post from its civil rights arm that reads the division 'has returned to enforcing the law as written: fairly, equally, and without political agenda.'
Nevada Rep. Steve Horsford, a contributor to the report, said Trump 'betrayed the American people' in enacting plans he said were similar to Project 2025.
Lawmakers reflect on the long fight for civil rights
Another contributor, Rep. Yvette Clarke, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said civil rights advocates and their Democratic allies must do more to communicate with and educate people.
'When you have an administration that's willing to take civil rights gains and call it reverse racism, then there's a lot of work to be done to unpack that for folks,' the New York Democrat said. 'I think once people understand their connection to civil rights gains, then we will be in a position to build that momentum.'
The Urban League originally planned to focus its report on the legacy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for the law's 60th anniversary but pivoted after Trump returned to office to focus on 'unpacking the threats to our democracy' and steps civil rights advocates are taking to pull the country back from 'the brink of a dangerous tilt towards authoritarianism.'
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For many veteran civil rights activists, the administration's changes are condemnable but not surprising. Some lawmakers see it as a duty to continue the long struggle for civil rights.
'I think it's all part of the same struggle,' said Rep. Shomari Figures, an Alabama Democrat who contributed to the report and whose father was successfully brought a wrongful-death suit against a branch of the Ku Klux Klan. 'At the end of the day, that struggle boils down to: Can I be treated like everybody else in this country?'
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