A year after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a clear pattern is emerging. Through dozens of executive orders, agency memoranda, budget decisions, and changes in law enforcement, the administration has weakened federal civil rights laws and the foundation of a racially inclusive democracy in the United States.
From its inception, the United States was not built to include everyone equally. The Constitution protected and promoted slavery. Most states limited the right to vote to white men. Congress restricted naturalized citizenship to “free white persons.” These decisions were not accidental: they defined who could belong to and exercise political power, and they cemented a racial political majority for generations.
That began to change in the 1960s. After decades of protests and social pressure, Congress passed laws prohibiting discrimination in employment, education, voting, immigration and housing.
Federal agencies were tasked with enforcing those laws, collecting data to identify discrimination, and conditioning public funds on compliance. These decisions transformed the country’s demographics and institutions, and the current Congress is “the most racially and ethnically diverse in history,” according to the Pew Research Center. The laws did not eliminate racial inequality, but they made exclusion more visible and harder to justify.
The first year of Trump’s second term marks a sharp turn in the opposite direction.
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Cumulative withdrawal
Instead of openly repealing civil rights laws, the administration has focused on disabling the mechanisms that make them work.
Based on more than two decades of teaching and research on civil rights and my experience directing a George Washington University Law School project on inclusive democracy, I believe this pattern does not reflect isolated administrative actions, but rather a cumulative retreat from the federal government’s role as guarantor of civil rights.
Over the past year, the president and his administration have taken a series of interconnected actions:
• On their first day in office, they announced the end of all federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs, including diversity positions, equity plans, and related grants and contracts.
• Shut down or dramatically reduced funding for federal programs aimed at reducing inequality, including those focused on minority health, minority-owned businesses, fair federal contracting, environmental justice, and closing the digital divide in internet access.
• They warned schools that diversity programs could put their federal funding at risk, opened investigations into colleges that offer scholarships to students protected by DACA — the Obama-era policy that protects undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation — and noted that colleges could lose federal aid if their accrediting agencies consider diversity.
• They revoked security credentials and access to federal buildings for employees of law firms with diversity policies. The Federal Communications Commission investigated media companies for promoting diversity and threatened to block mergers, leading several companies to abandon these initiatives.
• They issued a government-wide memorandum that called common practices in hiring, admission, and evaluation—such as forming diverse pools of candidates, assessing cultural competence, considering socioeconomic background, or seeking geographic and demographic representation—as potentially illegal and warned that federal funding could be withdrawn from institutions that use them. Federal prosecutors reportedly investigated contractors for considering diversity, calling these initiatives fraud.
• Weakened enforcement of anti-discrimination laws by ordering agencies to stop using disparate impact analysis, which identifies inequalities in outcomes and allows intervention when they are not justified. By eliminating this analysis, the ability to detect discrimination produced by algorithmic systems and automated decisions is reduced.
• Revoked an executive order that prohibited discrimination by federal contractors and required nondiscriminatory hiring practices, weakening a key mechanism in place since 1965.
• Eliminated data used to measure inequality, including data related to racial disparities in school discipline, special education, and environmental harms.
• Dismantled or severely reduced civil rights offices at multiple federal agencies. About three-quarters of the lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division left their positions.
• They pressured the Smithsonian to remove exhibits on racial injustice, restored Confederate monuments, and prohibited schools and teacher training programs from including content the administration called divisive, such as unconscious bias.
• Declared English the country’s only official language, eliminated the obligation to provide meaningful access to public services to people with limited English proficiency, and reduced language assistance services in several agencies.
• They attempted to limit birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment and adopted immigration practices that treat ethnicity and non-English accents as legitimate grounds for detention.
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An obvious pattern
Taken together, these changes have practical consequences.
When information on racial disparities stops being collected, discrimination becomes harder to detect. By abandoning disparate impact analysis, unfair practices without legitimate justification go unchallenged. By intimidating diversity programs through investigations and budget threats, institutions reduce opportunities. By presenting history and language as threats to unity, truth and freedom of thought and expression are undermined.
Administration officials maintain that these measures seek to prevent discrimination against white people, promote unity and ensure “equality without racial distinction,” citing a Supreme Court decision against affirmative action in college admissions. However, that ruling did not prohibit recognizing racial inequality or applying neutral policies to reduce it, and many actions are based on general accusations of illegality without concrete evidence.
The selective application of these policies is also revealing.
Books on racism and civil rights were removed from military libraries, while works praising Nazi ideas or supporting racial differences in intelligence remained. The admission of refugees – more than 90% from Africa, Asia and Latin America – was suspended, but the program was later reopened for white South Africans.
After a year, the pattern is undeniable.
The administration is not simply enforcing neutral rules: it is dismantling the systems that helped the United States move toward a more open and equal democracy, replacing them with policies that selectively restrict access to economic, cultural, and educational participation.
The result is not just a policy change, but a profound shift in the trajectory of American democracy.
This article was originally published by The Conversation
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