Trump Administration's Assault on Civil Rights and the 14th Amendment

The administration's attack on civil rights is not a political abstraction—it is a deliberate, documented strategy. As Sherrilyn Ifill wrote in February 2025, the sheer volume of Trump's actions targeted at programs and policies designed to advance the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equality is staggering. He has challenged birthright citizenship itself—the very first guarantee of the 14th Amendment—attempting to rewrite it and override the framers' intention to eliminate 'caste' in the United States. He issued an executive order banning the accurate teaching of racism in K-12 schools, deeming such teaching 'discriminatory equity ideology,' which would effectively erase the entire story of Black struggle, resilience, and demand for justice in American history. And he ended the requirement that federal policy consider the disproportionate environmental harms borne by communities of color—a hard-fought victory for environmental justice.

At the enforcement level, the DOJ Civil Rights Division is being dismantled from within. NPR reports that 70% of the division's lawyers are leaving because of Trump's reshaping—an exodus that departing attorney Futterman described as 'the most dramatic backward turn that I've experienced in my lifetime,' calling the changes 'an all-out assault on the civil rights of vulnerable people, including Black people, brown people, women, LGBTQIA folk.' Attorney General Pam Bondi has threatened to open criminal investigations into corporations and foundations that promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, despite the fact that no criminal law makes the promotion of DEI a crime—the threat itself is the tool of intimidation. These actions are not merely policy disagreements; they are an abandonment of the federal government's core responsibility to enforce equal protection under the law.