The Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation into Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia over the use of race in admissions to its top-ranked Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.
Last year, the US Supreme Court declined to hear arguments over the same allegations, but this investigation signals that the Trump administration will use the civil rights division to challenge affirmative action policies – a longtime hot-button issue for conservatives who claim that such admissions policies focus more on race than they do academic achievement.
The investigation follows a referral from the state attorney general who announced Wednesday that his office had found reasonable cause to believe the district and the school discriminated against Asian American students on the basis of race. In a letter Wednesday, DOJ Civil Rights Division Chief, Harmeet Dhillon, confirmed her office will review the matter.
The Supreme Court has weighed in on the issue of affirmative action before. In 2023, the high court threw out policies used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina that considered race in its admissions decisions. Their decision pushed schools to experiment with “race neutral” policies – such as those based on geography – to promote diversity.
The controversy at Thomas Jefferson High School in the Washington, DC, suburbs arose from a policy, which sought “to mitigate socioeconomic obstacles faced by students of all races” by admitting students from every middle school in the county, CNN has reported
A group of parents in Fairfax County sued the school board in 2021, alleging that the new policy sought to balance the student body’s racial makeup by “excluding Asian Americans,” who had comprised 70% of enrollment before the changes.
A federal judge in 2022 ordered the school to stop using the new admissions policy, ruling that it was “racially discriminatory,” but a panel of appeals court judges later reversed, saying that the policy did not disparately impact Asian American students and that the challengers didn’t establish that it was adopted with discriminatory intent.
Asra Nomani, a former Thomas Jefferson High School parent who has been actively involved in the litigation, told CNN that she is “elated” by news of the investigation. “I have always believed this was not an issue of parental advocacy, but of civil rights…this great day for efforts to win merit in America.”
In a statement, the Fairfax County Public Schools responded: “This matter has already been fully litigated. A federal appellate court determined there was no merit to arguments that the admissions policy for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology discriminates against any group of students. Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) division leadership and counsel are currently reviewing the documents released today by the Attorney General and will issue a more detailed response in the coming days. FCPS remains committed to providing a world class education for all of our students.”
The Supreme Court also declined to hear similar challenges, including one accusing three elite Boston public schools with violated the Constitution by using a zip-code based admissions policy.
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