Civil rights organizations and some members of Congress are troubled by the Trump administration’s rollback of civil rights enforcement generally, but they are particularly worried by what is going on at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The office has played a crucial role in protecting the rights of transgender students and victims of sexual assault and especially in forcing school districts to abandon disciplinary policies that unfairly single out minority children for suspension and expulsion.
This issue came to the fore this month when the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Candice Jackson, sent a memo to the office’s regional directors backing away from a policy that requires investigators to look for systemic problems — and whole classes of victims — when civil rights complaints emerge. The department says the new policy will expedite investigations, but critics rightly argue that it could discourage the staff from opening cases at all.
