In the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term, his administration has eliminated diversity initiatives across federal agencies, pushed to roll back provisions of the Civil Rights Act and fired some staffers working on civil rights issues.
The administration has done more to undo decades of civil rights work than any other president in recent memory, some activists and civil rights experts say.
“The pace of unraveling … civil rights protections has been unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center. “It is a reminder that we have to fight again and again for those critical protections.”
Trump and some conservative scholars argue it was well past time to redirect the priorities of the federal Justice Department and push back against what they call the “woke” agenda.
“They’re not unraveling decades of civil rights work,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “What they’re doing is putting a priority on enforcement matters that have been totally neglected by the prior administration.”
There are more than 200 lawsuits challenging Trump’s executive orders and other changes. Groups have also launched boycotts of businesses that retreated from diversity initiatives.
But even if those efforts succeed, Trump’s actions have already caused tremendous damage, activists say. With the stroke of a pen, the administration has set in motion the dismantling of laws intended to protect people from discrimination in schools, the workplace and at the polls. If not challenged, activists say, they could set the Civil Rights Movement back decades.
