In January of this year, however, shortly after Trump was sworn into office, the D.O.E. abruptly froze investigations into thousands of cases of alleged race and sex discrimination, including the case involving Blunt’s son. Linda McMahon, Trump’s Secretary of Education, lifted the freeze in March. A week later, the D.O.E. announced that it was closing seven of the O.C.R.’s twelve regional offices and firing around half of its roughly five hundred and fifty employees, as part of a broader “reduction in force” at the agency. In response, Public Justice, a nonprofit legal organization based in Washington, and attorneys at Glenn Agre Bergman & Fuentes sued the D.O.E., claiming that the drastic cuts would make it impossible for the agency to fulfill its statutory obligation to enforce civil-rights laws and would deprive children across the country who had been subjected to discrimination of a “meaningful path to relief.” One of the plaintiffs in the case was Tara Blunt, who, by this point, had withdrawn her son from public school and enrolled him at a private academy, despite the financial strain this imposed on her family. “I felt we didn’t have a choice—for his physical safety and his mental health,” she told me recently. “Every day, he would come home and say, ‘They made fun of my hair,’ ‘they called me this,’ ‘they called me that.’ He would say, ‘My heart hurts,’ or ‘I can’t take this anymore.’ ”
Victims of racist bullying are not the only children whom the evisceration of the O.C.R. has harmed. Another plaintiff in the lawsuit filed by Public Justice is Karen Josefosky, a resident of Troy, Michigan, whose ten-year-old son has a severe, potentially life-threatening allergy to dairy products. In 2023, this condition, which qualified as a disability, turned him into the target of abuse and ridicule. “Allergies are dumb!” one student exclaimed while pouring milk on Josefosky’s son’s lunch. On another occasion, a group of students tripped him to the ground, put a cheese crown made of paper on his head, and then taunted him with actual cheese. Because her son’s allergy could be triggered by mere contact with dairy products and because the harassment continued despite her complaints, a pediatrician advised Josefosky to keep him home. She decided to pull him out of school—and then filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights, which handles thousands of disability cases every year. After reviewing the evidence, a thick binder of documents that Josefosky had collected, O.C.R. investigators told her that her son’s case was a slam dunk. “They said, ‘Your case is so clear—this is one of the easiest cases we’ve ever seen,’ ” she recalled.
After the O.C.R. got involved, the school agreed to enter a facilitated mediation. But, after Trump was elected, the agency stopped responding to Josefosky’s e-mails, and the mediation effort stalled. Josefosky and her husband, Glenn, consulted a private attorney, who confirmed what they’d feared, which is that the shuttering of the O.C.R.’s regional offices had caused their son’s case to be set aside. (The lawyer, Elizabeth Abdnour, told me that an O.C.R. official informed her that, essentially, “nothing is happening right now—we’re shut down.”) Last spring, Karen Josefosky, who is a teacher, started homeschooling her son, which she said has prevented him from falling behind academically but which she knows cannot furnish him with the social benefits that attending school can provide. “He doesn’t have community,” she said, through tears. Her son, she added, was so shaken by the harassment that he had started trying to hide his allergies, which could put his safety at risk. “He’s been traumatized,” she said.
In May and June, a U.S. district court issued overlapping injunctions staying the D.O.E.’s reduction in force and directing it to return the O.C.R. employees who had been fired to work. But the Trump Administration delayed complying with the orders, reinstating only eighty-five of the dismissed workers while appealing the decisions. On September 29th, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit paused the injunction pertaining specifically to the O.C.R., citing an emergency order issued by the Supreme Court that granted the Trump Administration permission to proceed with large-scale dismissals at the D.O.E. Two weeks ago, the eighty-five O.C.R. investigators who had been reinstated were laid off again, among them the senior manager who described that second firing as a gut punch. (On Tuesday, a judge issued a preliminary injunction in a related case, though it remains unclear how the decision will affect the latest wave of O.C.R. terminations.) Like Karen Josefosky, the senior manager has a son with a disability, and she expressed concern that parents of children like her own may now have no way to protect them from mistreatment. “My child has been harassed on the basis of his disability in the past,” she said. “I think about what it would have been like for him if I had not had the expertise that I have. That’s what parents are going to be left with, especially people who don’t have the resources to file a lawsuit. The most vulnerable are going to suffer the most.”
Until recently, the complaints that the D.O.E.’s Office for Civil Rights investigated came primarily from students and families who contacted the agency at their own volition, reporting the harm they’d experienced—people like Karen Josefosky and Tara Blunt. Under Trump, the focus has shifted to investigations that have been generated internally, such as the announcement, in March, that forty-five universities across the country were being targeted for their “race-exclusionary” graduate programs. All the universities on the list—Duke, Cornell, Emory, George Mason—were being investigated for discrimination allegedly experienced by white students because of D.E.I. efforts. More recently, the O.C.R. threatened to cut federal funding to public schools in New York, Chicago, and Northern Virginia unless they stopped giving transgender and nonbinary students access to bathrooms and athletic programs consistent with their identity, which the Administration argues is a violation of Title IX, the law that bars sex-based discrimination in federally funded educational programs. (The Fairfax and Arlington County School Boards sued the Department of Education in August, noting that several courts have ruled that Title IX requires granting transgender students such access. A district judge dismissed their cases, but the school districts have since appealed the decision.) The Administration has also launched an unprecedented campaign to punish universities for allegedly failing to combat antisemitism on campuses where protests against the war in Gaza took place—charging them with compromising the safety of Jewish students, who have been singled out for protection that the members of other groups apparently don’t merit.
The directed investigations that now dominate the O.C.R.’s agenda are “purely political,” the senior manager who’d been fired told me. Some conservatives would argue that this agenda has always been partisan, shaped by the woke ideology of the Democrats. But is protecting children with disabilities from discrimination really a partisan cause? Or investigating schools that have failed to protect teen-age girls from abuse? “Access to feeling safe in an educational setting is not a partisan issue,” said Amanda Walsh, the deputy director of external affairs at the Victim Rights Law Center, a nonprofit that represents victims of sexual assault, including students who have been subjected to Title IX violations such as sexual harassment and violence. (The center is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit filed by Public Justice against the D.O.E.) “Sexual assault is not a partisan issue,” Walsh continued. “The clients that we serve are both Democrats and Republicans, and most of them are kids and students. I think the safety of our kids in K-12 schools and of students in university settings is one of the few values a lot of people can agree on.”
