Federal Overhaul is a multipart series that explores the impact of the Trump administration’s restructuring of the federal government on Black communities.
Black teenager Ja’Liyah Celestine said that last year at her Texas high school, an officer pepper-sprayed her, grabbed her by hair, and kneed her in her face.
A federal civil rights complaint was filed on her behalf and on behalf of other Black students, alleging that Beaumont Independent School District “violated Title IV and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against them and disproportionately subjecting them to law enforcement referrals.”
It’s unclear what will happen with that case and thousands of similar ones across the country. The U.S. Supreme Court this month allowed the Trump administration to continue with its plans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and shutter seven of its 12 Office for Civil Rights locations, including the Dallas office, which was overseeing Celestine’s claim. Advocates fear that students will be denied the resources they need to protect their basic rights at school.
“Over the past six months, we’ve received no meaningful communication about the case,” Andrew Hairston, the director of the Education Justice Project at the nonprofit Texas Appleseed, which filed the complaint, told Capital B. “The Office for Civil Rights being eviscerated like this curtails the ability of lawyers and advocates to use some of the tools available to us.”
In their complaint, attorneys pointed to federal data showing that while Black students represented 59.6% of enrollees in Celestine’s school district during the 2020-2021 academic year, they accounted for 75% of law enforcement referrals during that period. By contrast, white students represented 8.5% of enrollees and accounted for 0% of referrals.
Sheria Smith shared Hairston’s concerns. The president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, a union that represents workers at the Education Department, she had been assigned to the Dallas office.
This office, she told Capital B, served Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, and it was handling many cases involving potential abuse by school officers.
“We were very busy because those are states that have often been hesitant to follow Brown v. Board of Education,” Smith said, referring to the landmark 1954 case that desegregated public schools. “We’re hearing from people in the remaining offices that their caseloads have exploded. They’re saying that the workload is impossible — they’re going to do their best, but it simply isn’t humanly possible, and cases are getting dismissed.”
To learn more about the scope of the office closures and their potential impact on the future of education for vulnerable students, read on.
Which civil rights offices were abolished?
The Office for Civil Rights, one of the federal government’s primary mechanisms for enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, previously had a presence in 12 cities: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.
As part of the Trump administration’s erosion of the Education Department, only the offices in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City, Seattle, and Washington remain open.
In a 19-page dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized the conservative majority’s decision to scale back the protections the agency affords to students.
“Lifting the District Court’s injunction will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended,” she wrote in her dissent, which Justices Elena Kagan and Kentanji Brown Jackson joined.
Did these civil rights offices have any major achievements?
The shuttered offices handled many high-profile cases.
For instance, the Chicago office — which served Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin — found in 2022 that the Ottumwa Community School District in Iowa failed to fully address the harassment a Black student had endured for years. This abuse entailed the student’s peers calling him the N-word, telling him to go pick cotton, and mimicking George Floyd’s murder by kneeling on a Gatorade bottle.
Following the investigation, district officials agreed to take a number of corrective steps, including covering the student’s therapy services, releasing an antiharassment statement, and offering programs for students on issues such as discrimination.
That same year, the San Francisco office, which served California, resolved two significant cases involving students with disabilities.
In one, the Davis Joint Unified School District agreed to revise its crisis management policies following the death of a student with autism who had been restrained. And in the other, the Los Angeles Unified School District agreed to provide the legally required services — such as behavior and speech therapies — that it had not appropriately delivered to students with disabilities at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Were there any patterns in which civil rights offices were closed?
Smith said that she and some of her peers have yet to learn whether there was any kind of logic behind the closures.
“It’s curious to shut down offices that had especially high caseloads,” she said, referring to busy locations such as Dallas and Chicago. “We’ve heard that caseloads [for investigating attorneys in other offices who must now juggle extra work] have exploded from about 50 cases to 359 cases.”
Madison Biedermann, the deputy assistant secretary for communications strategy at the Education Department, defended the overhaul of the civil rights offices, saying that it’s for the benefit of students.
“OCR’s staff is composed of top-performing personnel with years of experience enforcing federal civil rights laws,” she told Capital B in a statement. “We are confident that the dedicated staff of OCR will deliver on its statutory responsibilities while working to resolve the longstanding backlog left by the previous administration.”
At least 240 of the estimated 570 Office for Civil Rights employees were fired, according to NPR. These cuts were part of the larger workforce reduction occurring within the Education Department. An estimated 1,300 agency employees — or one-third of the total staff — were targeted for elimination.
What will be the short-term and long-term impact?
More immediately, advocates worry that more cases will be dropped since the remaining offices won’t have the staff necessary to investigate claims. And those claims that are investigated might be delayed, given the department’s preexisting backlog of thousands of cases.
“We’re 15 months removed from [Celestine’s] incident,” Hairston said, noting that she has graduated from high school and will soon start her cosmetology studies. He added that, though ideally cases are resolved while students are still in school, “it’s already often true that kids have to wait an excruciatingly long period of time to receive even the most modest amount of relief for what has been done to them.”
Looking further ahead, Smith is concerned about what might await Black students across parts of the South, where some states haven’t willingly followed legal guidelines. The Brown v. Board of Education decision, she said, came out in 1954, but in Texas, there was litigation decades later that sought to integrate public schools.
“So you eliminated the oversight for states that have historically not been compliant with federal law when you eliminated these offices,” Smith explained.
Students with disabilities might also get left behind, according to advocates. A ProPublica analysis found that, of the about 12,000 complaints that were being investigated when President Donald Trump’s second term began, about 6,000 were disability claims.
Black students receiving special education services are anywhere from two to three times more likely than their white counterparts to be suspended, said Cheryl Poe, the founder and executive director of Advocating 4 Kids Inc., a special education advocacy organization.
“While white students get support and access to functional behavior assessments, behavior intervention plans, and related services, Black students are pushed into the school-to-prison pipeline,” she told Capital B. “But the saving grace, to some degree, was that parents and advocates could use avenues such as the Office for Civil Rights to file complaints.”
How else can students seek relief?
Advocates are taking stock of different ways to defend students’ rights, including by going through state and federal courts, Hairston said. He was thinking specifically of Section 1983 claims, a federal statute that permits people to sue certain government entities if they believe that a constitutional right has been violated.
Still, Hairston said, the path forward will be difficult if advocates can’t rely on the full suite of governmental tools for protecting students.
Additionally, the Education Department has adopted Trump’s priorities. Within weeks of the start of Trump’s second term, the agency opened probes into five Northern Virginia school districts. It claimed that the districts’ policies allowing transgender students to use facilities that align with their gender breaks federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools.
The department has also directed its attention toward the alleged discrimination that white students face and toward policies that support diversity, equity, and inclusion.
It launched an “End DEI” portal earlier this year that was touted by the far-right group Moms for Liberty as a means of getting schools to focus on “teaching their kids practical skills like reading, writing, and math, instead of pushing critical theory, rogue sex education, and divisive ideologies.”
“Often what we’re seeking when we submit complaints on behalf of Black children is a remediation of past discrimination and an acknowledgement that slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and mass incarceration inform how Black children receive their education in 2025,” Hairston said. “But now there’s been this unfortunate twisting of our country’s civil rights laws by the federal government at a time when we should be making sure that all children can succeed.”