For fourteen weeks I’ve been keeping a record on federal civil rights enforcement. The video above walks you through what it shows.
On June 8, I posted a chart with one number on it. Zero. That was the count of federal civil rights cases opened for Black students in 2025.
That same day I stacked the numbers next to it. Sixty-plus antisemitism investigations. Forty-five for anti-DEI. Six for race-based scholarships. Zero for racial discrimination against Black students. All from a Brookings Institution analysis of the Trump-era OCR docket.
On June 16, the Education Department announced it was moving civil rights investigation and enforcement to the Justice Department. The framing that day: “partnership,” “will not impact.”
On August 13, Human Rights Watch published Remedies Abandoned. Seventy-five percent of the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s attorneys are gone. Nearly half of the Office of Civil Rights staff, laid off in one day. Seven of twelve regional offices, closed.
The chair was filled. The division was not.
Kristen Clarke ran this division through January 2025. Harmeet Dhillon runs it now. The words “civil rights” haven’t changed. What they protect has.
Read the Human Rights Watch report yourself. Ask for the page. Then decide what those words mean when the office that enforces them has been taken apart.
Register at vote411.org. Your ballot is where meaning gets decided.
You refuse to know. The record remembers. I refuse to forget.
Sources
Human Rights Watch, Remedies Abandoned: US Civil Rights Enforcement Under the Trump Administration (Aug 13, 2026): hrw.org/report/2026/08/13/remedies-abandoned
Human Rights Watch, “US: Federal Agencies Abandon Civil Rights Duties” (Aug 13, 2026): hrw.org/news/2026/08/13/us-federal-agencies-abandon-civil-rights-duties
Higher Ed Dive, “Education Department to move core civil rights duties to DOJ” (June 17, 2026): highereddive.com/news/823059
Associated Press, “Trump’s Education Department is backing away from addressing civil rights for Black students” (June 3, 2026): apnews.com
Brookings Institution, “How the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is enforcing civil rights law under the Trump administration” (Feb 2026): brookings.edu
Axios, “Education Department has tossed thousands of civil rights complaints since mass layoff” (July 8, 2025): axios.com
A note from Jerry
I started this file on July 1, 2025 with a piece on the six point eight billion dollars in K-12 funding the Trump administration froze after Congress had already appropriated it. I was writing on Medium then. The pattern I ended up watching for the next fourteen months was smaller and quieter than a funding freeze. It was a staffing collapse.
By June 8, 2026, I had a chart with one number on it: zero federal civil rights cases opened for Black students the prior year. Two months later, Human Rights Watch published the count on the enforcement side. Seventy-five percent of the Civil Rights Division’s attorneys, gone. Half of the Office of Civil Rights staff, laid off in a day. Seven of twelve regional offices, closed.
The hard part was watching the framing hold. “Partnership” on the day of the transfer. “Will not impact.” Both said out loud, on the record, while the office that answered the complaints was being taken apart.
I am keeping a report. This report has my signature on it. I kept the file because someone had to.
On What Time Binds
Same Words, Different Worlds
Last week, I asked a reader to define DEI before we kept arguing about it.
Friday Binding: Who Opened It
Last Thursday I published a piece about 113 comments under the Orange County Register’s post on the fiftieth State of Black America. Not one of them referred to anything in the report. I called that contempt, and I stand on it.
The Foxhole
CBS Sunday Morning aired the segment on July 5, 2026. The firings came seven weeks later. The paperwork said insubordination. The evidence was the interview.
Where to Start
Author's note. I am pinning this piece here to the homepage so a reader arriving cold has a way in. If you have been here a while, this piece is for the friends you keep sending pieces to who do not yet know what they are looking at. Forward this to them.
Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years. His doctorate is from USC Rossier in Organizational Change and Leadership. He teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education and writes What Time Binds from Southern California about how institutions bend their words and how the record holds them to account.
