When callers phone a federal fair housing hotline in the spring of 2025, they reached only a recorded voice: “The number you reached is no longer in use.” A new Human Rights Watch report, “Remedies Abandoned: US Civil Rights Enforcement Under the Trump Administration,” uses that dead line as a symbol for what happened across federal civil rights enforcement, as the Trump administration hollowed out four key agencies over roughly a year and a half. Drawing on more than 40 interviews, the 112-page report traces the collapse of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, HUD’s Fair Housing office, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between January 2025 and the spring of 2026.
Attorneys have left the Civil Rights Division by the hundreds: nearly 300 of its roughly 400 lawyers were gone by June, and the Voting Rights Section, once staffed by dozens, was down to three. The order came from the top. An early memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi told career lawyers they are the president’s attorneys rather than neutral enforcers of the law, and Gloria A., who spent years in the division, said the idea “just flew out the window right then and there.” Nicole P. resigned that March and put the distinction plainly: “We viewed ourselves as attorneys for the United States, which is different.”
At the Education Department, the Office for Civil Rights lost nearly half its staff in a single day in March 2025 and shuttered seven of its 12 regional offices without warning. Career attorney Vince L. described the directive that arrived in the administration’s first weeks: “Stop all work. Decimate staffing. Divert resources to political witchhunts.” Only 112 cases ended in a resolution agreement that year, a steep drop from 507 the year before, even as $14.2 million already appropriated for investigators went unspent. HUD’s fair housing office saw its own staff cut by nearly two thirds, down to just 11 people from 31, and the agency has fired the attorneys who documented a gag order barring communication with complainants within weeks of their complaint going public.
The human toll shows up case by case. In Louisville, the Justice Department moved to dismiss a consent decree meant to reform a police department found to have used excessive force against Black residents, then dropped the last criminal charges against two officers involved in the raid that killed Breonna Taylor. Her mother, Tamika Palmer, said outside the courthouse, “She was killed because of their lies and negligence.” The department dismissed a similar Minneapolis consent decree one week before the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, and closed or retracted findings against police departments in Phoenix and Memphis.
In Houston County, Georgia, the department sued over a countywide voting system that diluted Black voters’ influence in a county roughly 33% Black, a system that has sent just one Black candidate to the county commission since 1980. The department dropped the case two months later without explanation, leaving the original plaintiff to refile as a private lawsuit. A similar reversal played out in Texas, where department lawyers have abandoned years of arguing that redrawn maps dilute Black and Latino votes and have defended those same maps instead.
In Lubbock, Texas, school staff reportedly interrogated a 12-year-old Black boy without his parents present and falsely accused him of a sexual offense. “After that I almost hated life,” he said. The regional office investigating his family’s complaint closed before it concluded, and an attorney representing the family later got only an automatic reply when she tried to reach the assigned investigator.
The dismantling has produced a chilling effect beyond the four agencies themselves. Universities, school districts, and nonprofits have started unwinding diversity and civil rights programs on their own, fearing investigation even where none exist. Alisa D., who directs an LGBTQ+ services nonprofit in Texas, said her staff has rewritten grant proposals and stripped references to the community they served, aiming for “the most innocuous organization that we could possibly be.” She said the fear such policies created will long outlast the administration itself.
Beyond staffing cuts, the administration has moved to weaken the disparate impact doctrine itself. An April 2025 executive order told agencies to stop enforcing cases built on statistical evidence of discrimination rather than proof of intent, the tool OCR had used to flag districts that punished Black students far more harshly than white students for the same behavior.
The Justice Department, the only agency that responded to HRW’s questions, rejected the findings and described the attorneys who resigned as activists who misused their authority to favor certain groups. HRW’s conclusion is blunt: Whatever the administration’s stated intentions, people who experience discrimination in the US now have far fewer places to turn, a reversal of the federal role Congress built because state and local governments cannot be trusted to protect people on their own.
Top photo: Protesters rally against institutional racism and police violence in June 2020 (Nathan Dumlao/Unsplash)
