Trump’s Justice Department Is Making Schools Segregated Again

The Department of Justice announced last week that it dismissed a “half century old Louisiana consent decree” providing for the desegregation of public schools in Plaquemines Parish, located at the southeastern tip of the state. In its press release, the DOJ says that a district court “found the schools had been properly integrated” in 1975, but “the case was never removed from the Court system.” And in the Trump administration’s view, it “righted a historic wrong” by ending the case now. “Louisiana got its act together decades ago, and it is past time to acknowledge how far we have come,” said Leo Terrell, Senior Counsel to the Civil Rights Division.

This is misleading at best, and at worst, it deliberately obscures the history of government-perpetuated racial injustice against schoolchildren in Plaquemines Parish. This dishonesty disserves students in the present, too. Desegregation orders are important tools for ensuring both the quality of students’ education and the safety of their learning environments. By dismissing the case, the Department of Justice is making it harder for Black families to protect their children from the lingering symptoms of the scourge of segregation.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools are unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. But places like Plaquemines Parish refused to desegregate, so the federal government began suing school districts to enforce the law. In 1967, a federal district court permanently enjoined the board from continuing to oversee segregated schools, and detailed specific steps for the board to take. The board appealed, and the Fifth Circuit affirmed the desegregation order in 1969. In 1971, when ruling on another motion coming out of the case, the district court said it was “clear that if the matter were left in the hands of the Parish school authorities, the system would never achieve unitary status.”

In January 1975, the district court found that the board managed to eliminate the effects of past discrimination (although it noted for posterity the board’s “great resistance” to doing so). As such, the court ordered the case “administratively closed,” but required the board to keep filing annual reports on student and faculty demographics, and the steps taken to make the quality of the physical facilities at the formerly-Black schools equal to that of the formerly-white schools. 

Today, neither the Department of Justice nor the board know if any reports were filed. They also don’t think it matters. “Given that this case has been stayed for a half-century with zero action by the Court, the parties, or any third-party,” the Justice Department and the Louisiana attorney general’s office wrote in their joint stipulation dismissing the case, “the parties are satisfied that the United States’ claims have been fully resolved on the merits, its injuries have been fully remedied, and no other unresolved issues remain.” (As for the missing reports, they say only that “the record of this case appears to be lost to time.”)

This would be a bold inference to make in the absence of evidence. It is especially bold in light of evidence to the contrary. Extensive research and reporting shows that the neglect of school desegregation orders is a pervasive issue across the country, and when such orders are underenforced or lifted, schools quickly resegregate. Today, although the population of Plaquemines Parish is 68 percent white, three of its eight public schools are at least 69.9 percent Black. One school in the district, Phoenix High, is 94 percent Black.

The DOJ and Louisiana also say that no one has taken “action” in the case in decades. But there is evidence to suggest that they are dismissing the case now in order to prevent “action” from happening. Last year, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund used a desegregation order in another Louisiana school district to address environmental safety issues, and Plaquemines Parish may be trying to avoid the same fate.

Back in 1963, LDF sued the St. John the Baptist Parish School Board and obtained a consent decree that required it to desegregate its school system and equalize the facilities of formerly all-Black schools. Fifth Ward Elementary, a predominantly Black elementary school in the district, is situated just a quarter-mile from a petrochemical facility, and in the census tract with the country’s highest risk of cancer from air pollution. An April 2022 Report prepared for the Louisiana Department of Health found that students at Fifth Ward Elementary “may potentially face unacceptably high cancer risks based only on the years of school attendance.” 

So in June 2024, LDF filed a brief arguing that this constituted the provision of unequal and inferior facilities, in violation of the desegregation order from six decades earlier. A district court heard a motion in October to remove all students and faculty from the school. Just two weeks later, the board voted 7-4 to close down Fifth Ward at the conclusion of this school year. One of the board members described the desegregation lawsuit as “the real elephant in the room” that prompted it to take action.

Plaquemines Parish is in a similar position. Pursuant to a contract with the Louisiana Department of Health, environmental engineers performed an assessment and sampling of water sources used for consumption at Phoenix High School, the school that is 94 percent Black. The engineers set out to determine the concentration of lead in the water, and published their findings in a June 2022 report. For reference, the Environmental Protection Agency’s “action level” for lead in drinking water—above which water systems replace lead service lines and notify the public of the risks of lead in drinking water—is 15 parts per billion (ppb). Yet at Phoenix High, the lead level of the water from a cafeteria sink faucet used for handwashing was 20.2 ppb. The lead level of the water from a kitchen fixture used for filling pots was 36.1 ppb. And the lead level of the water from a faucet used for handwashing in the kitchen and serving area was 412 ppb.

The court orders to which the Plaquemines Parish School Board was subject before last week required it to repair dilapidated schools attended by Black students, and to report on present or proposed construction of facilities. These obligations could have been helpful to any Phoenix High families trying to protect their kids from lead poisoning. But because of Trump’s Justice Department, that tool is no longer available.

In the DOJ’s press release, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said that Plaquemines Parish School Board will no longer have to “devote precious local resources over an integration issue that ended two generations ago.” But racism in Plaquemines Parish did not stop in 1975. In 1978, for instance, TIME magazine reported that the parish still had separate waiting rooms in public hospitals, separate mobile libraries for children, and separate hurricane evacuation plans. In 1986, the Associated Press reported that all 485 students at Phoenix High School stayed home on January 20 in protest of the board’s refusal to recognize Martin Luther King Day as a holiday. In 1966, a pro-segregation politician transferred ownership of eight schools and the land they were on to the parish and forced the school system to lease the buildings, thus depriving it of critical funds for Black students. The school system did not get the property back until 1999. 

School segregation is a modern-day problem. It both creates and entrenches barriers to educational opportunities, economic mobility, and broader societal equality. The Department of Justice once sought desegregation orders in order to surmount those barriers. Trump’s Justice Department is creating more obstacles instead.