Trump promised to take on campus discrimination, but insiders say mass cuts at Education Department make it ‘impossible’ to investigate civil rights complaints
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The Trump administration has gutted the ability of the Department of Education to investigate civil rights complaints at schools across the country, despite the president making tackling campus antisemitism a key part of his agenda.
Of the roughly 4,000 people at the agency, 1,315 have been slated for layoffs, and another 600 have accepted offers to leave.
Among those cut are at least 243 members of the department’s civil rights office, which investigates complaints of discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, and disability status at the nation’s schools. The department has also cut the number of regional offices, a key node in such investigations, from 12 to five.
“What you’ve got left is a shell that can’t function,” Catherine Lhamon, who ran the department’s Office of Civil Rights during the Obama and Biden administrations, told ProPublica, making it “virtually impossible” to investigate civil rights complaints.
The Independent has contacted the department for comment.
The new administration has already slowed the pace of civil rights investigations on campus, after ordering a freeze of most such cases when Trump took office and reportedly directing officials to prioritize antisemitism investigations above all others.
A February ProPublica analysis found that the pace of the department opening new civil rights investigations under Trump so far has been between six and 10 times slower than that of Biden during the same period.
While the Department of Education may be able to field less civil rights complaints coming in, it has gone on the offensive in other areas, leaning on threats and “directed investigations,” launched by the administration rather than an outside complaint, to tackle campus antisemitism.
This week, it warned 60 colleges and universities that they could face prosecution unless they complied with federal civil rights obligations to protect Jewish students from religious discrimination.
The administration has already pulled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia, the target of one such investigation, over its alleged failure to stop campus antisemitism.
In addition to using directed investigations and the power of the purse, the administration has also used the State Department to enforce its agenda on campus.
Over the weekend, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested recent Columbia grad and campus pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil in a university-owned apartment building.
Khalil, a legal permanent U.S. resident with a green card, was detained because of the nature of his political activism, officials said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, told The Independent on Sunday that Khalil was arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”
Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” they added.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio determined there was “reasonable ground to believe that [Khalil’s] presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” according to a document obtained by The Washington Post.
An administration official told The Free Press the Khalil arrest would be a template for a wave of future immigration operations based on allegations of campus antisemitism.
“The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” the officials said, but that such students are a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.”
Elsewhere, the administration has sought to roll back discrimination protections under the same law it’s using for its campus antisemitism probes.
Trump has directed federal agencies to ignore a Biden-era order to enforce a 2020 Supreme Court decision that found that anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination amounted to sex discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
