WASHINGTON ‒ In the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term, his administration has eliminated diversity initiatives across federal agencies, pushed to roll back provisions of the Civil Rights Act and fired some staffers working on civil rights issues.
The administration has done more to undo decades of civil rights work than any other president in recent memory, some activists and civil rights experts say.
“The pace of unraveling … civil rights protections has been unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center. “It is a reminder that we have to fight again and again for those critical protections.”
Trump and some conservative scholars argue it was well past time to redirect the priorities of the federal Justice Department and push back against what they call the “woke” agenda.
“They’re not unraveling decades of civil rights work,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “What they’re doing is putting a priority on enforcement matters that have been totally neglected by the prior administration.”
There are more than 200 lawsuits challenging Trump’s executive orders and other changes. Groups have also launched boycotts of businesses that retreated from diversity initiatives.
But even if those efforts succeed, Trump’s actions have already caused tremendous damage, activists say. With the stroke of a pen, the administration has set in motion the dismantling of laws intended to protect people from discrimination in schools, the workplace and at the polls. If not challenged, activists say, they could set the Civil Rights Movement back decades.
“It’s been a full-frontal assault, and it’s left people quaking. It’s left people shaking. It’s left people deeply angry, deeply upset, deeply agitated to see their rights yanked away from them,” said Barbara Arnwine, president and founder of Transformative Justice, a civil rights organization. “People feel like they’re being more and more othered in their own country.”
‘The laws protect everyone’
Trump has signed several executive orders related to civil rights, including one early in his administration that eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the federal government. Another required federal agencies to recognize only two sexes, male and female.
More recently, Trump signed an order that would repeal or amend provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, saying his change “guarantees equality of opportunity, not equal outcomes.”
More: Trump’s new order could unravel years of protections against discrimination, activists say
In addition, the administration has closed civil rights offices in some federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, and fired civil rights and DEI workers. It has also halted some civil rights cases at the Education Department.
Some conservatives say it’s about time, especially at the Department of Justice.
The agency should file discrimination lawsuits no matter the group, including ones protecting white people, von Spakovsky said. But it hasn’t adequately pursued those cases, he said.
“If you look at all the laws that the Civil Rights Division enforces, whether it’s the Voting Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act, the laws are race neutral,” said von Spakovsky, who worked at the agency for four years. “When they were first passed, the cases, almost all of them, involved discrimination against Black Americans, against Hispanics, against Asians ‒ but the laws protect everyone.”
He also applauded the president’s executive order, titled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” which aimed to address what Trump called “the unlawfulness of disparate-impact liability” in the Civil Rights Act.
The law requires a policy or action to be changed if it has a “disparate impact” leading to discrimination of a particular group, even if that was not its intent. The administration argues that this disparate-impact liability violates the Constitution, federal civil rights laws and “basic American ideals” because it requires businesses to consider race to avoid “crippling legal liability.”
Using disparate impact is not a valid way of proving discrimination, von Spakovsky said.
“What I believe they’re doing is they’re going back to the original intent and the original purpose of those laws and enforcing them the way Congress intended them to be enforced,” he said.
‘Project 2025 on steroids’
Trump’s agenda on civil rights follows the playbook of Project 2025, a conservative plan to overhaul the federal government, including eliminating agencies like the Education Department, civil rights activists say. As a candidate, Trump repeatedly distanced himself from the Project 2025 agenda.
Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, a civil rights organization, called Trump’s executive orders “Project 2025 on steroids.”
“It’s gut-wrenching, disheartening, very very tragic for the nation,” he said. “It’s an attack on the future.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, described Trump’s first 100 days as “Project 2025 in motion.”
“Let’s not treat these like reforms when they are clear attacks on civil rights many marched and bled and in some cases died for,” Sharpton said in a statement.
South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, a Democrat and former history teacher, said it’s not the first time a president or Congress has tried to roll back civil rights protections.
He noted the backlash after Reconstruction, a period after the Civil War where newly freed enslaved people became politically involved only to later face nearly a century of racial violence. “Things in this country have never moved on a linear plane,’’ Clyburn said.
Goss Graves said Trump’s agenda is clear, including his attack on the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“They’re not just going for diversity and inclusion programs,” she said. “They’re not going for some limited ideas. They will not be satisfied until that compact from the Civil Rights Act, that 60-year-old compact, is destroyed. We will fight for it with our every breath.”
‘Full-scale assault against allour democratic institutions’
For veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, watching what they see as the dismantling of the civil rights laws they fought for has been disappointing and infuriating. It has spurred them to ramp up their efforts to train the next generation of organizers.
“My focus is trying to figure out how do we organize the Black community and other communities,’’ Courtland Cox, a veteran of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, told USA TODAY.
Cox said no one should be surprised about Trump’s actions because he has long made his intentions known. “I really don’t care what he thinks,” he said. “Only thing I care about is that he’s not in power.’’
Judy Richardson, also a SNCC veteran, said Trump’s moves go way beyond just rolling back civil rights gains. It’s an attack on all Americans, she said.
“It’s important that we, who organized in the 1960’s civil rights movement, don’t view this as just ‘another rodeo’ or ‘we’ve been through this before,’” Richardson said. “What Trump and his followers are forging really is a full-scale assault against all our democratic institutions and the rule of law as we’ve known it in recent times.
“If we don’t understand that what we’re dealing with now is far more dangerous than anything we fought against during the Civil Rights Movement, we won’t be able to adequately mount a counteroffensive,” she said.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump’s first 100 days set back civil rights protections, activists say
