The Justice Department said on Thursday it had ended its watchdog role in more than 50 cases enforcing racial desegregation in schools, mostly in the Deep South, a significant milestone in the Trump administration’s bid to overhaul civil rights enforcement in America.
Justice Department records showed that 57 desegregation orders have been dismissed since the start of President Trump’s second term, although it could not be verified late Thursday that a judge had ruled in each one. Nearly 80 percent of the cases were in five Southern states — Alabama with five, Georgia with 15, Louisiana with 11, Mississippi with 13 and South Carolina with one.
“This is just the beginning,” Steve Marshall, the attorney general of Alabama, said in a social media post thanking Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, for ending “outdated orders” in his state. “We will keep working until every school district in Alabama is free from unnecessary consent decrees.”
Five of the dismissals were in Florida, and there was one each in Arkansas, Arizona, Connecticut, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, according to department records.
The federal government’s policy pivot has been deeply polarizing, particularly among civil rights advocates and legal scholars who have opposed the shift.
Groups including the N.A.A.C.P. have said that desegregation orders do more than change the racial makeup of classrooms by mandating equal funding, access to high-quality facilities and fair representation in advanced placement programs.
“Schools are just as segregated today as they were in the late 1960s,” Democrats on the House Education and Workforce Committee said Thursday in a social media post, adding that the Trump administration was “turning us back toward the Jim Crow era.”
Segregation in schools has been on the rise in recent years, partly stemming from a 1991 Supreme Court ruling that made it easier for school districts to be released from court-ordered desegregation, according to a 2024 study published by the American Journal of Epidemiology. The study found that school segregation significantly affects racial disparities in children’s health.
But the Justice Department suggested that the desegregation cases were relics of the nation’s past that continued to impose unnecessary financial burdens on local governments.
“In some cases, school districts have been under federal control for more than 60 years,” Ms. Dhillon said in a statement. “Now these local school districts can redirect taxpayer dollars back to benefiting students, instead of funding onerous and outdated consent decrees.”
As of last year, more than 130 school systems were under Justice Department desegregation orders, according to court records.
The Justice Department assigned a pair of lawyers to review the desegregation orders case by case to determine whether the data showed evidence of racial unity.
“In this administration,” Ms. Dhillon said, “we are ending prolonged federal oversight of these school districts because the effort does not reflect the reality of those classrooms today.”
The desegregation cases trace back to the racial disparities that defined the Jim Crow era in the United States, when local laws — particularly in the South — effectively ensured segregation in public spaces. The Supreme Court cemented those laws with an 1896 ruling, Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that “separate but equal” public facilities were legal.
Segregation remained in place for decades until another Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which determined that racial separation was unconstitutional.
In the aftermath of the Brown ruling, the Justice Department regularly took school districts to court to enforce the decision. Many of those cases resulted in consent decrees that required ongoing reporting from local school districts and monitoring from the federal government.
The bid to eliminate those consent decrees is just one front in the Trump administration’s broader push to reorient enforcement of civil rights law.
Mr. Trump has signed a spate of executive orders aimed at purging consideration of diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., a catchall term increasingly used to describe policies that benefit those who are not white men.
Other orders have targeted historically marginalized groups, along with the laws and court rulings in place to protect them. The Trump administration has abandoned civil rights cases in education, employment, housing and trade issues, while filing lawsuits aimed at prohibiting transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s’ sports teams and suing states to turn over voter registration data.
