Latest news with #EducationJusticeProject
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Thousands of Student Civil Rights Cases Left Adrift After Trump Guts Ed Dept
After a campus police officer grabbed student Ja'Liyah Celestine by the hair and kneed her in the face, she filed a federal civil rights complaint that alleged persistent racial discrimination against Black teens at her Texas high school. But the complaint, brought by the 18-year-old in late October with the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, may never get investigated. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter That's because it's one of thousands of federal civil rights complaints and investigations against school districts nationally — particularly those alleging sexual misconduct or racism — that advocates say have been left to languish by the Trump administration with little hope for resolution. As the president and Secretary Linda McMahon seek to dismantle the Education Department — with its civil rights office among the hardest hit by layoffs — attorneys say students like Celestine have lost one of their few avenues for relief. 'When we filed the complaint on Oct. 29, we knew the election was a few days out and we knew this could very well be the outcome,' said Andrew Hairston, the director of the Education Justice Project at the nonprofit Texas Appleseed, who is representing Celestine in her complaint against the Beaumont Independent School District and its police department. 'It's very difficult for Black children, in particular, who face the harms of school police, to seek any vindication of their rights.' Related Since President Donald Trump took office in January, civil rights attorneys at the Education Department have faced a whirlwind of directives and layoffs, throwing into uncertainty more than 12,000 civil rights investigations that stemmed from complaints by students, parents and their advocates. The Education Department and the Beaumont school district didn't respond to requests for comment. After investigations nationwide were paused following Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration, the Education Department's staff was cut roughly in half through layoffs of more than 1,300 employees, buyouts and early retirements. When the department announced mass firings earlier this month, at least 243 civil rights office staffers were cut. Meanwhile, seven of the 12 Office for Civil Rights regional offices were shuttered, including those in Philadelphia and Dallas, Texas, where Celestine's complaint was filed. It's a situation that civil rights advocates say has left the Education Department unequipped to carry out its functions mandated by Congress. In a lawsuit filed March 14, advocates and families accused the Trump administration of eviscerating students' access to federal civil rights remedies, with particular harm to students of color, female students and LGBTQ+ youth. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has prioritized cases tied to antisemitism complaints and has cracked down on schools that afford rights and protections to transgender students. The lawsuit alleges the changes undermine the civil rights office's ability to process and investigate complaints and asked a judge to order that its staffing be restored to levels that allow complaints from the public to be investigated 'promptly and equitably.' Staffing changes were 'arbitrary and capricious' the lawsuit charges, because Trump administration officials 'did not articulate a reasoned basis for their decision to sabotage' the Office for Civil Rights. 'The fact that the federal government is kind of both eliminating these offices and then weaponizing what's left of them to advance a very narrow definition of discrimination is not just troubling and sad, it's also fundamentally antithetical to what democratic governance and law enforcement should look like,' said Johnathan Smith, the chief of staff and general counsel at the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law. Related Smith represents the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Education Department and McMahon. They include Nikki Carter, a Black mother of three, who alleges she was barred from her children's Alabama schools in retaliation for her work as an advocate for children with disabilities. A second parent, identified only as A.W., charges they had to remove their child from school for safety reasons after the student was sexually assaulted and harassed by a classmate and the school did not adequately respond. Both parents are members of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a nonprofit focused on the civil rights of children with disabilities. Carter's complaint was filed in September 2022 and A.W.'s in October 2023. It was spring 2024 when Celestine got into a fight and campus police in Beaumont were called to the scene. Though the civil rights complaint submitted to the Education Department by the nonprofit Texas Appleseed doesn't seek to absolve Celestine for her role in the fight, it takes aim at what happened next: A police use-of-force incident captured on video. 'Responding after the fight occurred' when the teenager was sitting passively on the floor, the complaint states, the officer with the school district police department pepper-sprayed Celestine, grabbed her by the hair and kneed her in the face. 'Such excessive force caused great harm' and was just the first form of punishment Celestine received for the fight, the complaint alleges. She was also suspended from school, placed in an alternative education program and required to complete community service — 'consequences that exceeded the nature of the incident in question,' it argues. 'This complaint does not ignore the significance of an offense such as in-school fighting,' Texas Appleseed's Hairston wrote to federal investigators. But the altercation that Celestine was involved in 'did not warrant the abuse she was subjected to.' The issue at Beaumont is bigger than Celestine and a campus fight, Texas Appleseed contends. It 'represents a salient example of how the school-to-prison pipeline operates,' according to the complaint, and highlights how Black students at the district and nationally are disproportionately subjected to law enforcement referrals in schools. The 12,000 civil rights investigations that were pending as of Jan. 14 ahead of Trump's inauguration were listed in an online database that hasn't been updated since. Federal civil rights investigations routinely take years to resolve and the oldest pending complaint at the time, alleging sex-based discrimination in athletics against an Oklahoma school district was opened in 2007. After Trump's swearing-in, the Education Department paused all investigations in its civil rights office. In February, the agency ended the pause on investigations focused solely on disability-based discrimination, and then lifted the hold on sex- and race-based complaints on March 6 — just a week before the 243 OCR staffers were fired. At least 178 attorneys in the civil rights division and dozens of equal opportunity specialists were eliminated. The Dallas regional office was among those shut down altogether, possibly relegating Celestine's case and thousands more to oblivion. Smith with the National Center for Youth Law said he's heard from fired Education Department employees who've lost access to their email accounts and all ability to communicate with families and attorneys about pending complaints. 'Unless someone is actually going to go into their email accounts and pull up those emails, those communications are lost,' Smith said. As a result, parents and school officials who are communicating with Education Department officials about pending cases are 'literally communicating into a black hole because there's no way for that information to go anywhere.' Even if pending cases are transferred to other regional offices, Smith said, they should be considered dead on arrival. 'I just don't see how anyone can believe that there's going to be any real process or consideration of those complaints at this point,' Smith said. While certain cases appear to be jettisoned, fired Education Department staffers who spoke to The 74 and others allege the department's civil rights division has been weaponized to pursue politically motivated investigations. Among them is an investigation into the Denver school district for opening a gender-neutral bathroom at one of its high schools. Last week, the Office for Civil Rights found the state of Maine violated Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination, for allowing transgender student athletes to participate on girls' sports teams. As the Trump administration targets diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at schools and colleges, the Education Department opened an investigation against the Ithaca, New York, school district, charging a Students of Color United Summit designed to 'provide a safe space' and 'uplift students of color' was discriminatory against white students. Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator at the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, accused the Trump administration of launching 'directed investigations' to advance political agendas 'based on something they read in the newspaper' rather than from complaints filed by students attending those schools. 'This department is clearly fixated on race and reinterpreting what is racial discrimination,' Jordan said. Ideological beliefs around racial discrimination and transgender students' rights, he said 'seem to have spilled over into how they see civil rights enforcement.' Jordan said the ACLU represents students in about 20 pending federal civil rights complaints nationally, yet 'nobody is hearing anything' from the civil rights office about the status of those investigations. Among the complaints is an allegation by seven students that Pennsylvania's Central Bucks School District engaged in a widespread culture of discrimination against LGBTQ+ students, particularly those who are transgender and nonbinary. 'Given their diatribes about gender ideology and stuff, I suspect that they're not going to be terribly sympathetic,' Jordan said. 'But we ultimately don't know, and ultimately they're supposed to follow the law and enforce the law.' Meanwhile, at least one civil rights complainant bowed out before the Trump administration could even weigh in, said Katie McKay, an attorney at the Brooklyn law firm C.A. Goldberg where she works on cases involving sexual discrimination, harassment and assault at K-12 schools and colleges. McKay said a college student whose sexual assault case 'had been open since Obama was in office,' decided to voluntarily close the complaint after Trump was elected for a second term 'because of concerns that this administration would mishandle the case.' 'It's frustrating and sad to see that this person has been sitting with this unresolved issue for like a decade and then it's kind of this non-resolution,' McKay said. The decision to terminate the complaint was made in part on the long history of sexual assault allegations against the president himself. In 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse against the writer E. Jean Carroll in 1996. 'There's this fear that those values were going to be applied to the case,' McKay said. 'Closing out the case at least created a sense of closure on their own terms rather than letting this administration speak for them.'
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A Chicagoan's journey through incarceration, deportation and the fight for ‘A New Path'
Erick vividly remembers stepping off a plane at the Texas-Mexico border, shackled, when he was deported in 2013. The group he was with was marched single-file across the border to Matamoros, Mexico, to a bus terminal, which he said was just sandbags and barbed wire. Though Erick was familiar with gangs in Chicago, he said he had no familiarity with what group violence looked like in Matamoros. 'It's worse,' he said. 'You know how to navigate that world, as opposed to here, you have no idea what to expect.' Erick was brought to the United States from Mexico at 4 months old. He was deported 33 years later, after being imprisoned for 15 years for a first-degree murder he says he didn't commit. Without knowledge of the judicial system, he pleaded guilty to murder because his attorney told him he thought it would shorten the length of his sentence. Upon request, his last name is being withheld by the Tribune to maintain privacy. His wife, Lee Ragsdale, was familiar with the travails of formerly incarcerated people due to her work for the Education Justice Project, a unit of the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that produced guides to help with reentry. She began working for the project in 2010, and after watching her husband deal with the unknowns of deportation, she advocated for a similar resource specifically for noncitizens navigating a different type of entry into a new country. Published by an EJP team in 2018, the guide, called 'A New Path: A Guide to the Challenges and Opportunities After Deportation,' provides tips not just for those facing the threat of deportation but also for their family members. It offers an in-depth explanation of the detention process's logistics and suggestions for moving forward. President Donald Trump's recent return to the White House has skyrocketed requests for the guide, written in both English and Spanish, Ragsdale said. About 4,000 electronic or hard copies of 'A New Path' were accessed in the 12 weeks after November's election, Ragsdale said, compared with only about 50 to 100 in the same period of time before it. It's unsurprising, she said, given the recent law passed by Congress and signed by Trump that permits the detention of unauthorized immigrants accused of widely disparate crimes from shoplifting to murder. The 172-page guide delves into complicated processes and explains how to obtain IDs and documents in different places. It is unique in providing country-specific information for people who may not have lived in those places since childhood. 'This is the only guide of its kind out there,' she said. 'There's 'Know Your Rights' pamphlets, there's small deportation planning guides, but there's nothing that's as comprehensive as this.' For people without U.S. citizenship, Trump's immigration policies can add paranoia to every aspect of life, said Maria-Elena Young, a faculty associate at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and an assistant professor at UC Merced. 'The way our immigration laws work in this country is that they function essentially to criminalize (noncitizen) peoples' day-to-day activities,' Young said. The guide suggests it's not too late to start thinking about a plan for a possible return to a home country, even setting up a caregiver plan in case a parent is separated from a child. A 'caregiver affidavit' form lets someone else take over responsibilities like sending a kid to school or the doctor. 'A New Path' also sheds light on the ways that undocumented people live in the shadows — in some cases avoiding driving, health care or reporting crimes committed against them. The guide contains information about which vulnerable groups who have faced acts of violence or crime may be able to get protection to stay in the U.S. 'Knowing what to expect can take away some of the anxiety and stress,' the guide states. One of the most-used aspects of 'A New Path' is a card that people can tear out and have with them if Immigration and Customs Enforcement comes to their door. The cards include a reminder of basic constitutional rights that apply to everyone, regardless of citizenship status: the right not to open the door if an immigration agent is knocking, to remain silent, to ask for a judicial warrant and to have a hearing. Ragsdale said the guide's main questions at the outset are: 'How can you avoid detention? And if you are detained, how can you organize your affairs so that you and your children are less vulnerable?' Growing up in Chicago, Erick was involved in a gang at a young age but said he didn't commit the murder he was charged with in 1999 when he was 19. He said police officers used coercion and manipulation against him when he was arrested about a year earlier. 'I remember being handcuffed to the wall at the police station,' he said. 'One officer would come punch me and slap me and put a knee on my neck against the wall.' Because his family didn't have much legal knowledge, he pleaded guilty to a crime he said he did not commit because he thought it would cut down on his time in prison. But Erick's attorney didn't advise him that by pleading guilty as a noncitizen he would be deported upon his release from prison — permanently separated from his family in Chicago, including his mother. 'It never crossed anybody's mind, not mine, not family members, anybody,' Erick said. Though Erick had his green card, he found out later — when he was in prison in Joliet — that he would be deported. Green-card holders getting released from prison and sent to their home countries is standard deportation procedure, according to immigration attorneys. Erick's attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Due to a 2010 Supreme Court ruling, it is now required to inform noncitizens of the potential immigration consequences of entering a guilty plea. In the early 2000s, while in prison, Erick said he turned his life around and detangled from the gang he had grown up with while living in Little Village. He took his General Educational Development test, got three associate degrees, and co-founded an English as a second language peer tutoring program. He started his bachelor of arts degree while incarcerated and completed it after he was deported. Immediately after getting out of prison in 2013, Erick was briefly taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He was shackled in the back of a bus and shuttled between ICE detention centers in four different states before being sent to Mexico. It can be hard to deal with the logistics of getting a job and finding a place to live in a new country while processing the trauma of deportation, said Ragsdale. It was hard for Erick, she said. 'Having 15 years of your life stolen from you … those are key developmental years for someone,' she said. 'And then on top of it, you thought you would be able to go home to Chicago, to your family, to your friends, to your community, and instead, you're exiled from the only country you've ever known.' 'A New Path' speaks to what to know after being dropped off at the border and offers specific resources for reentry to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. It outlines how people who have been deported can get important IDs and documents, and think about their job search. Erick now processes his deportation experience through poetry: 'We climb on the buses / Like a field trip / But no zoo at the end / Another lifetime / Wrapped in chains / Closed windows / Grates. 'The burnt smell wafts from that dark / Wood? Rubber? / And then I see it— / That's Mexico. / Is that home?' Cases like Erick's and others who seek out 'A New Path' raise fundamental and tough questions about the purpose of the criminal legal system, said Caitlin Patler, a sociologist whose research examines U.S. immigration and criminal laws. 'Why do only some people get a second chance (after serving time in prison), and why should that be based on where they were born?' she asked. Erick and Ragsdale have lived in Mexico for 12 years now and have created a community for themselves. But they said it's challenging to find work that pays enough, and it's hard to feel close to family when you're so far away. Erick hasn't been able to visit his mother, Maria, in her Chicago apartment since he went to prison 26 years ago. On a recent afternoon, Maria, whose name is being withheld by the Tribune for protection, sat in her house in Little Village and looked at photos of her son. Large canvases of the sketches and paintings Erick created in prison were propped up against the pink walls around her. Though Maria has her citizenship and can visit Erick where he lives in Mexico, she said it's not the same. He can't help her as she gets old or watch his niece and nephew grow up. With the paintings, at least, she said she 'always has something of his.' Erick said that if he tried to reenter the U.S., he might lose his mom forever. Entering the U.S. illegally after deportation can result in fines or imprisonment for up to two years. Returning to the U.S. with a felony conviction can result in imprisonment for up to 20 years. One of the last sections of the guide touches on how to practice mindfulness and build connections in an unfamiliar environment. It maintains a note of positivity. 'How did deportation help you grow? How have you become a better person?' it asks. Erick and his wife have started an animal rescue organization (Mexipets, a nonprofit in the U.S.). They focus on the friends they have in Mexico and their work. And they appreciate time with their family even more. Ragsdale is researching and preparing a new guide to come out this summer, which will respond to Trump's immigration orders. But Erick, who was deported under former President Barack Obama, said deportations happen no matter who the president is. The system is the same, he said. Growing up in Chicago, he said he remembers reading the Polish street names under the Spanish ones in Little Village. 'In many ways, immigration is not going to change,' he said. To download a free PDF of the deportation guide or request hard copies, visit the Reentry Resource Program's website at
Chicago Tribune
08-02-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
A Chicagoan's journey through incarceration, deportation and the fight for ‘A New Path'
Erick vividly remembers stepping off a plane at the Texas-Mexico border, shackled, when he was deported in 2013. The group he was with was marched single-file across the border to Matamoros, Mexico, to a bus terminal, which he said was just sandbags and barbed wire. Though Erick was familiar with gangs in Chicago, he said he had no familiarity with what group violence looked like in Matamoros. 'It's worse,' he said. 'You know how to navigate that world, as opposed to here, you have no idea what to expect.' Erick was brought to the United States from Mexico at 4 months old. He was deported 33 years later, after being imprisoned for 15 years for a first-degree murder he says he didn't commit. Without knowledge of the judicial system, he pleaded guilty to murder because his attorney told him he thought it would shorten the length of his sentence. Upon request, his last name is being withheld by the Tribune to maintain privacy. His wife, Lee Ragsdale, was familiar with the travails of formerly incarcerated people due to her work for the Education Justice Project, a unit of the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that produced guides to help with reentry. She began working for the project in 2010, and after watching her husband deal with the unknowns of deportation, she advocated for a similar resource specifically for noncitizens navigating a different type of entry into a new country. Published by an EJP team in 2018, the guide, called 'A New Path: A Guide to the Challenges and Opportunities After Deportation,' provides tips not just for those facing the threat of deportation but also for their family members. It offers an in-depth explanation of the detention process's logistics and suggestions for moving forward. President Donald Trump's recent return to the White House has skyrocketed requests for the guide, written in both English and Spanish, Ragsdale said. About 4,000 electronic or hard copies of 'A New Path' were accessed in the 12 weeks after November's election, Ragsdale said, compared with only about 50 to 100 in the same period of time before it. It's unsurprising, she said, given the recent law passed by Congress and signed by Trump that permits the detention of unauthorized immigrants accused of widely disparate crimes from shoplifting to murder. The 172-page guide delves into complicated processes and explains how to obtain IDs and documents in different places. It is unique in providing country-specific information for people who may not have lived in those places since childhood. 'This is the only guide of its kind out there,' she said. 'There's 'Know Your Rights' pamphlets, there's small deportation planning guides, but there's nothing that's as comprehensive as this.' Managing paranoia For people without U.S. citizenship, Trump's immigration policies can add paranoia to every aspect of life, said Maria-Elena Young, a faculty associate at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and an assistant professor at UC Merced. 'The way our immigration laws work in this country is that they function essentially to criminalize (noncitizen) peoples' day-to-day activities,' Young said. The guide suggests it's not too late to start thinking about a plan for a possible return to a home country, even setting up a caregiver plan in case a parent is separated from a child. A 'caregiver affidavit' form lets someone else take over responsibilities like sending a kid to school or the doctor. 'A New Path' also sheds light on the ways that undocumented people live in the shadows — in some cases avoiding driving, health care or reporting crimes committed against them. The guide contains information about which vulnerable groups who have faced acts of violence or crime may be able to get protection to stay in the U.S. 'Knowing what to expect can take away some of the anxiety and stress,' the guide states. One of the most-used aspects of 'A New Path' is a card that people can tear out and have with them if Immigration and Customs Enforcement comes to their door. The cards include a reminder of basic constitutional rights that apply to everyone, regardless of citizenship status: the right not to open the door if an immigration agent is knocking, to remain silent, to ask for a judicial warrant and to have a hearing. Ragsdale said the guide's main questions at the outset are: 'How can you avoid detention? And if you are detained, how can you organize your affairs so that you and your children are less vulnerable?' One of many Growing up in Chicago, Erick was involved in a gang at a young age but said he didn't commit the murder he was charged with in 1999 when he was 19. He said police officers used coercion and manipulation against him when he was arrested about a year earlier. 'I remember being handcuffed to the wall at the police station,' he said. 'One officer would come punch me and slap me and put a knee on my neck against the wall.' Because his family didn't have much legal knowledge, he pleaded guilty to a crime he said he did not commit because he thought it would cut down on his time in prison. But Erick's attorney didn't advise him that by pleading guilty as a noncitizen he would be deported upon his release from prison — permanently separated from his family in Chicago, including his mother. 'It never crossed anybody's mind, not mine, not family members, anybody,' Erick said. Though Erick had his green card, he found out later — when he was in prison in Joliet — that he would be deported. Green-card holders getting released from prison and sent to their home countries is standard deportation procedure, according to immigration attorneys. Erick's attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Due to a 2010 Supreme Court ruling, it is now required to inform noncitizens of the potential immigration consequences of entering a guilty plea. In the early 2000s, while in prison, Erick said he turned his life around and detangled from the gang he had grown up with while living in Little Village. He took his General Educational Development test, got three associate degrees, and co-founded an English as a second language peer tutoring program. He started his bachelor of arts degree while incarcerated and completed it after he was deported. Immediately after getting out of prison in 2013, Erick was briefly taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He was shackled in the back of a bus and shuttled between ICE detention centers in four different states before being sent to Mexico. Starting over It can be hard to deal with the logistics of getting a job and finding a place to live in a new country while processing the trauma of deportation, said Ragsdale. It was hard for Erick, she said. 'Having 15 years of your life stolen from you … those are key developmental years for someone,' she said. 'And then on top of it, you thought you would be able to go home to Chicago, to your family, to your friends, to your community, and instead, you're exiled from the only country you've ever known.' 'A New Path' speaks to what to know after being dropped off at the border and offers specific resources for reentry to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. It outlines how people who have been deported can get important IDs and documents, and think about their job search. Erick now processes his deportation experience through poetry: 'We climb on the buses / Like a field trip / But no zoo at the end / Another lifetime / Wrapped in chains / Closed windows / Grates. 'The burnt smell wafts from that dark / Wood? Rubber? / And then I see it— / That's Mexico. / Is that home?' Cases like Erick's and others who seek out 'A New Path' raise fundamental and tough questions about the purpose of the criminal legal system, said Caitlin Patler, a sociologist whose research examines U.S. immigration and criminal laws. 'Why do only some people get a second chance (after serving time in prison), and why should that be based on where they were born?' she asked. Pieces and people left behind Erick and Ragsdale have lived in Mexico for 12 years now and have created a community for themselves. But they said it's challenging to find work that pays enough, and it's hard to feel close to family when you're so far away. Erick hasn't been able to visit his mother, Maria, in her Chicago apartment since he went to prison 26 years ago. On a recent afternoon, Maria, whose name is being withheld by the Tribune for protection, sat in her house in Little Village and looked at photos of her son. Large canvases of the sketches and paintings Erick created in prison were propped up against the pink walls around her. Though Maria has her citizenship and can visit Erick where he lives in Mexico, she said it's not the same. He can't help her as she gets old or watch his niece and nephew grow up. With the paintings, at least, she said she 'always has something of his.' Erick said that if he tried to reenter the U.S., he might lose his mom forever. Entering the U.S. illegally after deportation can result in fines or imprisonment for up to two years. Returning to the U.S. with a felony conviction can result in imprisonment for up to 20 years. Healing and moving forward One of the last sections of the guide touches on how to practice mindfulness and build connections in an unfamiliar environment. It maintains a note of positivity. 'How did deportation help you grow? How have you become a better person?' it asks. Erick and his wife have started an animal rescue organization (Mexipets, a nonprofit in the U.S.). They focus on the friends they have in Mexico and their work. And they appreciate time with their family even more. Ragsdale is researching and preparing a new guide to come out this summer, which will respond to Trump's immigration orders. But Erick, who was deported under former President Barack Obama, said deportations happen no matter who the president is. The system is the same, he said. Growing up in Chicago, he said he remembers reading the Polish street names under the Spanish ones in Little Village. 'In many ways, immigration is not going to change,' he said.
