Latest news with #LawyersCommittee
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
14th Amendment was ratified 157 years ago to grant citizenship to Black Americans. MAGA is now reshaping it
'In some ways, the 14th Amendment is the original articulation that Black lives matter,' says Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law. On July 9, 1868, the 14th Amendment was ratified to the U.S. Constitution, granting U.S. citizenship to Black Americans after hundreds of years of enslavement. The crucial amendment would later serve as the legal framework for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination at a time of systematic racial segregation and disenfranchisement. 'In some ways, the 14th Amendment is the original articulation that Black lives matter,' says Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, referring to the amendment's repeal of the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted enslaved African Americans as three-fifths of a person. Hewitt told theGrio, 'It is fundamental to this nation holding up to its stated ideals.' Nearly 160 years later, advocates are fretting over how the 14th Amendment is being relitigated, literally and politically, and, as they argue, distorted. In recent years, conservative litigants have used the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause to argue cases of so-called white discrimination, most notably the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 ruling that prohibits race-based affirmative action in college admissions. The Equal Protection Clause was also used to block former President Joe Biden's debt relief program for Black farmers, filed by a conservative law firm founded by Trump's deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, on behalf of white farmers. President Trump and administration officials have repeatedly pointed to SCOTUS' affirmative action ruling to suggest that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are 'illegal,' and as a basis for his executive order banning DEI across the entire federal government. But legal experts have repeatedly dismissed that argument, clarifying that the decision is limited to college admissions and not DEI writ large. Hewitt, who said the affirmative action ruling was a 'horrible decision,' explained to theGrio that the Equal Protection Clause during its conception was about prohibiting 'racial classifications that exclude Black people.' The civil rights attorney said that while he thinks its 'fair' to use the 14th Amendment clause to argue against such racial classifications that also exclude white people and other racial or ethnic groups, average DEI programs do not exclude anyone. 'It's about inclusion,' he asserted. 'What is being done with the Equal Protection Clause now is making equity the enemy of equality,' argued Meeta Anand, senior director of Census & Data Equity at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She explained, 'What you're seeing is claims that any efforts to provide a helping hand to those who have been persistently and historically disadvantaged and face systemic barriers to their own advancement, that any efforts to help them overcome these systemic barriers is viewed as suspect and in violation of equality.' Anand told theGrio, 'You need efforts that are grounded in equity in order to create a society where everyone thrives, because we recognize that these systemic barriers and decades and centuries of being disadvantaged cannot just be remedied by saying we are just going to treat everyone exactly the same.' The 14th Amendment isn't just being used to strip away programs intended to close gaps of racial disparites; it's also being retooled to potentially strip away the citizenship of millions of Americans, with a particular targeting of Hispanics and Latinos. Birthright citizenship, another major clause of the 14th Amendment guaranteeing citizenship for individuals born in the United States, is under new scrutiny after President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the end of the constitutional right for the children of immigrants. 'That was meant for the babies of slaves…It wasn't meant to scam the system and come into the country on a vacation,' said Trump while defending his birthright citizenship order at the White House after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of his petition to curb nationwide injunctions in a case seeking to enjoin his executive action. On Thursday, a federal judge blocked Trump's birthright order nationwide, certifying a class action suit on behalf of children impacted by his executive order. Rob Randhava, senior counsel at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said that birthright citizenship was primarily a 'response to the issue of slavery and the issues that culminated in the Civil War'—that constitutional right to citizenship would later be affirmed in future Supreme Court cases involving immigrants and their children. 'It's been pretty settled law in terms of who is entitled to citizenship under that clause for an extremely long time,' Randhava told theGrio. He explained, 'When somebody wants to try to start chipping away at it, then it really puts the entire structure of the 14th Amendment more broadly at risk and really a lot of uncertainty around for the possibility of first-class and second-class citizenship here in the United States.' Contemplating a more chilling outcome should the courts ultimately rule in Trump's favor to end birthright citizenship, Randhava said, 'It creates stateless people and basically a legal caste system in society that I think sets an extremely dangerous precedent.' He added, 'What does that say about their ability to amend other parts of the Constitution?' Trump seeking to amend the Constitution through executive action is unprecedented. By law, it can only be amended through a two-thirds vote in Congress or a national convention called by Congress at the request of two-thirds of the state legislatures. Ratification requires approval by three-fourths of the 50 U.S. states, either through their legislatures or special state conventions. Hewitt senses a more sinister plan by Trump and his MAGA allies. 'He's trying to chip away at the margins…If you look at the electoral map of how many states Trump won in the 2024 election [and] you have control in those states, that's enough states to call a constitutional convention and actually amend the Constitution and to bend it to his will,' he told theGrio. 'All the civil rights statutes that exist in the United States exist because they tie it back to the Reconstruction Amendments–the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments. If those get altered or aggregated, then what do we have? Everything falls apart.' Hewitt clarified, 'They don't have that ability now,' but added, 'I think there are people watching that electoral map, knowing that if they can just get enough states to ratify regressive amendments, they can try to hold on to white power for even longer.' Anand told theGrio that while the 14th Amendment represented 'the beginnings of the birth of a multiracial democracy' in the U.S., 'What we are seeing now is an attempt to redefine at every level, what it means to be American.' She explained, 'This is an attempt to erase all the steps we have taken as a society since the 14th Amendment and the other civil rights amendments to have that greater understanding of what [that] means.' Anand said that while the Trump administration is aiming to dismantle birthright citizenship, Republicans are also attempting to 'limit [census] apportionment to citizens only'—as opposed to all residents in a state—which would reshape representation in U.S. Congress. She tells theGrio that it is 'contrary to the 14th Amendment and cannot be done through mere legislation.' As far as birthright citizenship and Trump's repeatedly saying the clause was intended only for the children of the enslaved, Hewitt said Trump is 'not an originalist or a textualist in terms of his reading.' 'Trump was given that line by someone else,' he told theGrio. 'They don't really care about original intent. So I don't think that there's any intellectual honesty coming from Trump.' Hewitt asserted, 'He's basically saying don't look at the words, look at the context. But that's exactly what the conservative jurists and scholars of public law say you shouldn't do.' He added, 'It really puts the lie to their notions of originalism and textualism–and it is quite selective.' More must-reads: Despite Trump's grip on DEI, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear says red states have a duty to uplift racial justice Members of Congress introduce resolution demanding equal pay for Black women Trump amazed by African president's 'good English,' gleefully accepts praise for Nobel Peace Prize
New York Times
27-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
Trump Administration Tells State Regulators It Won't Back Some Discrimination Claims
The Trump administration is making it harder for state and local agencies to enforce certain workplace discrimination laws, another step in its efforts to strip away longstanding civil rights protections for minority groups. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the nation's primary regulator of workplace discrimination, pays state and local civil rights agencies to process and investigate many discrimination claims under work-sharing agreements. But in a memo sent to those agencies last week, the E.E.O.C. said it would stop paying them for claims involving transgender workers or those based on what is known as disparate impact, which relies on statistical outcomes to prove discrimination. The memo, which was viewed by The New York Times, said the policy was retroactive to Jan. 20, when Mr. Trump took office. That loss of federal resources will make it harder for state and local agencies to investigate these claims. Legal experts say the policy is likely to be challenged in courts and fits into the Trump administration's efforts to chip away at civil rights law. 'They are consistently eroding the protections from the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other foundational civil rights laws in this country, and undermining the rights of particular communities,' said Maya Raghu, a director at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocacy group. The E.E.O.C. declined to comment on the memo, which was dated May 20. While presidents do not have the authority to unilaterally change civil rights laws, the Trump administration has used executive orders to chart a new path on enforcement. The memo said the directive to state and local agencies was consistent with two of Mr. Trump's executive orders — one that asserted that the federal government recognizes only two sexes, male and female; and another that ordered federal agencies to halt their use of 'disparate-impact liability.' In workplace discrimination cases, disparate-impact tests are used to determine whether an employer's policy that appears neutral on its face disadvantages a particular group of people. Legal experts say that the test is one of the most critical tools for prosecuting civil rights discrimination. 'Disparate-impact theory is a really important mechanism for rooting out discrimination and inequality,' said Stacy Hawkins, a professor at Rutgers Law School who specializes in employment law. The E.E.O.C. has emerged as a key enforcer of President Trump's agenda. Under Andrea Lucas, the acting chair who was appointed by Mr. Trump, the agency has already dismissed discrimination cases it previously filed on behalf of transgender employees, and it has investigated law firms for their D.E.I. policies. The E.E.O.C. allocated $31.5 million to state and local civil rights agencies last year. Those agencies help process about two-thirds of the tens of thousands of discrimination claims the E.E.O.C. receives each year. State and city agencies are still required by local laws to enforce claims based on transgender discrimination or disparate impact, but those who rely on the E.E.O.C. for a significant portion of their budgets, the policy change will hinder the ability to fully process or investigate these claims. The Maine Human Rights Commission, for example, receives nearly a third of its funding from the E.E.O.C., according to a spokesperson. For bigger states, the percentage of funding tends to be smaller. New York and California receive roughly 5 percent of their funding from the E.E.O.C., according to officials from those states' agencies. 'We are deeply disappointed that the E.E.O.C. has decided that it will no longer support investigations of claims involving discrimination based on gender-identity and disparate-impact discrimination,' New Jersey's attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, a Democrat, said in an emailed statement. The E.E.O.C., established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to enforce anti-discrimination laws, has a long history of bringing claims based on disparate impact, even under the first Trump administration. In 2018, the agency secured a $3.2 million settlement from the railroad company CSX Transportation over strength tests it required as part of its job applications, which the agency said ended up disproportionately excluding women, a protected class under civil rights law. In 2012, the E.E.O.C. began processing complaints of gender-identity and sexual orientation discrimination. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that gay and transgender employees were protected against discrimination under the landmark civil rights law. Since that ruling, the agency has processed thousands of such cases including 3,000 last year. Because of the agency's new policy, the number of such cases that lead to investigations is likely to shrink drastically. Jocelyn Samuels, who was a Democratic commissioner at the agency until Mr. Trump fired her a few days into his second term, said she worried that the E.E.O.C's memo signaled to state and local agencies that they should prioritize the president's executive orders over the Civil Rights Act. The result may lead local agencies 'to de-emphasize or ignore' cases claiming gender-identity or disparate-impact discrimination. Such an outcome, Ms. Samuels added, would deprive people of the 'tools that the government can bring to bear in enforcing the law and vindicating their rights.'
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Trump Seeks to Strip Away Legal Tool Key to Civil Rights Enforcement
President Trump has ordered federal agencies to abandon the use of a longstanding legal tool used to root out discrimination against minorities, a move that could defang the nation's bedrock civil rights law. In an expansive executive order, Mr. Trump directed the federal government to curtail the use of 'disparate-impact liability,' a core tenet used for decades to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by determining whether policies disproportionately disadvantage certain groups. The little-noticed order, issued last month with a spate of others targeting equity policies, was the latest effort in Mr. Trump's aggressive push to purge the consideration of diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., from the federal government and every facet of American life. The directive underscores how Mr. Trump's crusade to stamp out D.E.I. — a catchall term increasingly used to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male — is now focused not just on targeting programs and policies that may assist historically marginalized groups, but also on the very law created to protect them. 'This order aims to destroy the foundation of civil rights protections in this country, and it will have a devastating effect on equity for Black people and other communities of color,' said Dariely Rodriguez, the acting co-chief counsel at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocacy group. The disparate-impact test has been crucial to enforcing key portions of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. For decades, it has been relied upon by the government and attorneys to root out discrimination in areas of employment, housing, policing, education and more. Civil rights prosecutors say the disparate-impact test is one of their most important tools for uncovering discrimination because it shows how a seemingly neutral policy or law has different outcomes for different demographic groups, revealing inequities. Lawyers say the test has been crucial in showing how criminal background and credit checks affect employment of Black people, how physical capacity tests inhibit employment opportunities for women, how zoning regulations could violate fair housing laws, and how schools have meted out overly harsh discipline to minority students and children with disabilities. Over the last decade, major businesses and organizations have settled cases in which the disparate-impact test was applied, resulting in significant policy changes. One of the largest settlements involved Walmart, which in 2020 agreed to a $20 million settlement in a case brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that claimed the company's practice of giving physical ability tests to applicants for certain grocery warehouse jobs made it more difficult for women to get the positions. The use of the disparate-impact rule, however, has also long been a target of conservatives who say that employers and other entities should not be scrutinized and penalized for the mere implication of discrimination, based largely on statistics. Instead, they argue that such scrutiny should be directed at the explicit and intentional discrimination prohibited by the Civil Rights Act. Opponents say that that disparate-impact rule has been used to unfairly discriminate against white people. In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who claimed reverse discrimination when the city threw out a promotional examination on which they had scored better than Black firefighters. Mr. Trump's order resurrects a last-ditch effort made in the final days of his first term to repeal disparate-impact regulations through a formal rule-making process, which was nixed by the Biden administration when he left office. The new order, titled 'Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,' echoes arguments that Mr. Trump has adopted from far-right conservatives, who say that the country has become too focused on its racist history, and that protections from the civil rights era have led to reverse racism against nonminority groups. Disparate-impact liability is part of 'a pernicious movement' that seeks to 'transform America's promise of equal opportunity into a divisive pursuit of results preordained by irrelevant immutable characteristics, regardless of individual strengths, effort or achievement,' the order stated. The president ordered federal agencies to 'eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible,' under the law and Constitution, and required that agencies 'deprioritize enforcement of all statutes and regulations to the extent they include disparate-impact liability.' That means that no new cases are likely to rely on the theory in civil rights enforcement — and existing ones will not be enforced. His order also instructs agencies to evaluate existing consent judgments and permanent injunctions that rely on the legal theory, which means that cases and agreements in which discrimination has been proved could be abandoned. The order takes aim directly at the use of the test in enforcing the Civil Rights Act, requiring Attorney General Pam Bondi to begin repealing and amending any regulations that apply disparate-impact liability to implement the 1964 law. One of the most glaring examples in history of how seemingly race-neutral policies could disenfranchise certain groups are Jim Crow-era literacy tests, which some states set as a condition to vote after Black people secured rights during Reconstruction. The literacy tests did not ask about race, but were highly subjective in how they were written and administered by white proctors. They disproportionately prevented Black people from casting ballots, including many who had received an inferior education in segregated schools, and were eventually outlawed with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1971, the Supreme Court established the disparate-impact test in a case that centered on a North Carolina power plant that required job applicants to have a high school diploma and pass an intelligence test to be hired or transferred to a higher-paying department. The court ruled unanimously that the company's requirements violated the Civil Rights Act because they limited the promotion of minorities and did not measure job capabilities. Mr. Trump's executive order, which is likely to face legal challenges, falsely claimed that the disparate-impact test was 'unlawful' and violated the Constitution. In fact, the measure was codified by Congress in 1991, upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 2015 as a vital tool in the work of protecting civil rights, and cited in a December 2024 dissent by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the disparate impact theory 'wrongly equates unequal outcomes with discrimination and actually requires discrimination to rebalance outcomes.' 'The Trump administration is dedicated to advancing equality, combating discrimination and promoting merit-based decisions, upholding the rule of law as outlined in the U.S. Constitution,' Mr. Fields said. GianCarlo Canaparo, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has argued that eliminating disparate impact would be the final blow to D.E.I., noted that Mr. Trump would need the help of Congress to fully eradicate the rule. But he said the president's order would still have a 'salutary' impact on the American public by helping people understand that racial animus and disparate outcomes 'are not the same things, and they shouldn't be treated the same way in law.' 'These claims that racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country is just empirically false,' Mr. Canaparo said. 'The problem with disparate-impact liability is that it presumes that falsehood is true, and accordingly distorts civil rights.' Mr. Trump's order contends that businesses and employers face an 'insurmountable' task of proving they did not intend to discriminate when there are different outcomes for different groups, and that disparate impact forced them to 'engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability.' Catherine E. Lhamon, who served as the head of the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights under Presidents Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., disputed that. Her office conducted several disparate-impact investigations that found no intentional wrongdoing, she said. 'It's a rigorous test,' Ms. Lhamon said, 'and sometimes it proves discrimination and sometimes it doesn't.' The order's impact will be particularly felt at the Education Department, where the Office for Civil Rights has heavily relied on data showing disparate outcomes when investigating complaints of discrimination in schools. In one case, the office examined large disparities in the rates of Native American students being disciplined, particularly for truancy, compared with their white peers in the Rapid City Area Schools in South Dakota. In the course of the investigation, the school superintendent attributed the tardiness of Native American students to 'Indian Time,' the Education Department report stated. The superintendent later apologized and was fired. Last year, the school district agreed to make changes to its practices as part of a voluntary resolution agreement with the Education Department. The Trump administration abruptly ended that agreement in April, citing the president's directives to eliminate race-conscious policies. The Justice Department has also long relied on the theory to identify patterns of police misconduct and other discrimination pervasive in communities of color. In 2018, the department helped secure a settlement and a consent decree with the City of Jacksonville and the Jacksonville Fire Department after finding that Black firefighters were blocked from promotions because of a test that did not prove necessary for the fire department's operations. Now the Justice Department's embattled civil rights division has halted the use of disparate-impact investigations altogether, officials said. In an interview last month, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, praised the executive order for rolling back what she called 'a very discredited' theory that 'should be overruled.' 'We're not in that business anymore, pursuant to the executive order,' she told the conservative podcast host Glenn Beck. She went on to suggest that the level of discrimination that spurred civil rights laws no longer existed. 'It's 2025, today,' she said, 'and the idea that some police department or some big employer can be sued because of statistics, which can be manipulated, is ludicrous and it is unfair.' Civil rights advocates say Mr. Trump is trying to effectively gut anti-discrimination laws by fiat. Ms. Rodriguez, of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said disparate impact had become a crucial guardrail for 'ensuring that there are no artificial barriers that are limiting equal access to economic opportunity in every facet of our daily life.' The test helps root out discrimination that many people may not realize is constraining their opportunities, she added. 'The impact of this,' Ms. Rodriguez said of Mr. Trump's order, 'cannot be overstated.'
