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“WE’VE BEEN ESSENTIALLY MUZZLED”: DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION HALTS
THOUSANDS OF CIVIL RIGHTS INVESTIGATIONS UNDER TRUMP  
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Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen
February 13, 2025
ProPublica
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_ The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has opened
about 20 investigations focused on Trump’s priorities, placing more
than 10,000 student complaints related to disability access and sexual
and racial harassment on hold. _

,

 

In the three-and-a-half weeks since Donald Trump returned to the
presidency, investigations by the agency that handles allegations of
civil rights violations in the nation’s schools and colleges have
ground to a halt.
At the same time, there’s been a dramatic drop in the number of new
cases opened by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil
Rights — and the few that attorneys have been directed to
investigate reflect some of Trump’s priorities: getting rid of
gender-neutral bathrooms, banning transgender athletes from
participating in women’s sports and alleged antisemitism or
discrimination against white students.

The OCR has opened about 20 new investigations since Trump’s
inauguration, sources inside the department told ProPublica, a low
number compared with similar periods in previous years. During the
first three weeks of the Biden administration, for instance, the
office opened about 110 new investigations into discrimination based
on race, gender, national origin or disability, the office’s
historic priorities. More than 250 new cases were opened in the same
time period last year.

Historically, the bulk of investigations in the office have been
launched after students or their families file complaints. Since Trump
took office, the focus has shifted to “directed investigations,”
meaning that the Trump administration has ordered those inquiries.

“We have not been able to open any (investigations) that come from
the public,” said one longtime OCR attorney who asked not to be
named for fear of losing their job.

Several employees told ProPublica that they have been told not to
communicate with the students, families and schools involved in cases
launched in previous administrations and to cancel scheduled meetings
and mediations. “We’ve been essentially muzzled,” the attorney
said.

A spokesperson for the Education Department did not respond to
requests for comment.

Even though new case openings typically slow during a presidential
transition as new political appointees gain their footing and set
priorities, it is not typical for it to all but stop. “Under the
first Trump administration, of course things shifted and there were
changes, but we never had this gag order on us,” said another OCR
attorney who also asked not to be named.

The shift at the OCR comes as Trump has called the Education
Department a “con job” and is expected to issue an executive order
that the department be dismantled. In her confirmation hearing on
Thursday, Trump’s nominee to be education secretary, Linda McMahon,
said she hadn’t decided whether to cut funding to the OCR, as
Republicans have called for
[[link removed]].

This week, the Trump administration terminated more than $900 million
in contracts
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that mostly focused on education research and data on learning and the
country’s schools. The cuts were made at the behest of Elon Musk’s
cost-cutting crew
[[link removed]], known as
the Department of Government Efficiency, which said it also ended
dozens of training grants for educators that it deemed wasteful.

Since 1979, the department’s civil rights arm has worked to enforce
the nation’s antidiscrimination laws in schools
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It operates under a congressional mandate to uphold the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 as well as the federal laws that prohibit discriminating
against students because of gender or disability.

About 12,000 complaints were under investigation when Trump took
office. The largest share of pending complaints — about 6,000 —
are related to students with disabilities who feel they’ve been
mistreated or unfairly denied help at school, according to a
ProPublica analysis of department data.

Investigators were pursuing about 3,200 active complaints of racial
discrimination, including unfair discipline and racial harassment. An
additional roughly 1,000 complaints were specific to sexual harassment
or sexual violence, the analysis found. The remainder concern a range
of discrimination claims.

Students and families often turn to the OCR after they feel their
concerns have not been addressed by their school districts. The
process is free, which means even if families can’t afford a lawyer
to pursue a lawsuit, they may still get relief — access to
disabilities services or increased safety at school, for example.

When the OCR finds evidence of discrimination, it can force a school
district or college to change its policies or provide services to a
student, and it sometimes monitors the institutions to make sure they
comply.

Last fall, for example, the OCR concluded that a rural Pennsylvania
school district had failed to protect Black students from racist
taunts and harassment by a group of white students. White students in
the Norwin School District had circulated a photo of themselves
labeled “Kool Kids Klub,” wore Confederate flag clothing, told a
Black student to “go pick cotton” and used racial epithets,
investigators found. District officials initially said they saw no
problem with some of the white students’ behavior and did not
believe the students had created a racially hostile environment.

But the OCR’s findings and corrective action required the district
to study several years of racial harassment complaints and undergo
training on how to better respond to racial conflict in the district.

The department’s power to hold schools accountable when they fail to
protect students and provide relief in real time — while a student
is still in school — makes its work urgent, civil rights attorneys
and department staff said.

About 600 of the Education Department’s roughly 4,000 employees work
in the OCR, either at the Washington headquarters or one of 12
regional offices. At least 74 department employees, some of whom had
taken diversity training, have been placed on administrative leave,
according to Sheria Smith, an OCR attorney and president of the
American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, a union that
represents nonmanagement Education Department employees.

Smith said 15 of those workers on leave are from the OCR. Fifty newer
Education Department employees were fired Wednesday, she said,
including three from the OCR.

“The one thing that is clear right now is we have a complete
disruption of the services we provide and are hearing from our
stakeholders,” Smith said, citing as an example a Kentucky family
reaching out to silenced OCR workers to plead for answers about the
complaint they’d made about how their elementary school handled
their child’s sexual assault.

“It is the members of the public that are suffering with these
disruptions,” she said.

Another department employee who asked not to be identified, fearing
they could lose their job, said a number of the students’ complaints
are urgent.

“Many of these students are in crisis,” the employee said. “They
are counting on some kind of intervention to get that student back in
school and graduate or get accommodations.”

There are students who need help now, the employee said. “And now
the federal government is literally doing nothing.”

The department’s new leadership has said publicly it plans to
broaden the types of discrimination the department will investigate.
Among the cases it is investigating is whether one all-gender restroom
in a Denver high school discriminates against girls. The acting head
of the OCR even took the unusual step of announcing the investigation
in a press release, something previous administrations typically did
not do.

“Let me be clear: it is a new day in America, and under President
Trump, OCR will not tolerate discrimination of any kind,” acting OCR
head Craig Trainor said in the press release announcing that he had
directed civil rights staff to investigate a Denver Public Schools
bathroom because it “appears to directly violate the civil rights of
the District’s female students.”

Denver schools spokesperson Scott Pribble called the investigation
“unprecedented.” He added, “This is not the first all-gender
bathroom we have in a school, but it’s the first time an
investigation has been opened by OCR.” There are other girls’
restrooms in the school; only one was converted to an all-gender
restroom after students lobbied school administrators to do so.

Trainor again took a tough approach on Wednesday when he announced a
new investigation into high school athletics groups in Minnesota and
California, both of which have said they would not shut transgender
women out of women’s sports. The administration had already opened
three similar investigations against other institutions for alleged
violations of Title IX, the federal law that prevents gender-based
discrimination in education programs, in response to the executive
order
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Trump had signed to ban transgender women and girls from participating
in women’s sports.

The states “are free to engage in all the meaningless
virtue-signaling that they want, but at the end of the day they must
abide by federal law,” Trainor said.

The OCR also decided that it would investigate a complaint filed in
August by the Equal Protection Project, a conservative nonprofit, that
alleges discrimination against white students. The Biden
administration had not acted on the complaint, but new department
leaders decided within days that it would proceed with an
investigation. The complaint alleges that the Ithaca City School
District in New York excluded white students by hosting an event
called the Students of Color Summit.

Cornell University professor William Jacobson, who founded the Equal
Protection Project, said his organization has filed about 60
complaints over the years with the OCR, some of which remain under
investigation. Asked whether he thought the change in administration
helped fast-track the Ithaca complaint, he said, “I don’t see how
it could have hurt.”

“We want evenhanded enforcement, and we hope the department will be
more aggressive than it has in the past,” Jacobson said. “If there
are programs that exclude Black students, we want the department to go
after that, but I am not aware of such programs.”

Ithaca school officials declined to comment.

Catherine Lhamon, who oversaw the OCR under former Presidents Barack
Obama and Joe Biden, questioned the current administration’s
approach of issuing press releases to announce investigations. One
announcement included a quote from a former collegiate athlete who has
railed against transgender women in sports.

“It’s hugely political and suggests a conclusion before the OCR
has even conducted an investigation,” Lhamon said. The agency, she
said, is supposed to be a neutral fact-finder.

The agency appears to have ended its long-standing practice of making
public a list of institutions that are being investigated and what
type of discrimination is alleged. That was last updated Jan. 14, the
week before Trump’s inauguration.

We are continuing to report on the U.S. Department of Education. Are
you a former or current Education Department employee? Are you a
student or school employee impacted by changes at the department? You
can reach our tip line [[link removed]] on
Signal at 917-512-0201. Please be as specific, detailed and clear as
you can.

Mollie Simon [[link removed]]
contributed research.

_Jennifer Smith Richards
[[link removed]] is a
reporter for ProPublica. She began her journalism career writing
obituaries in West Virginia, then covering small-town southern Ohio.
She wrote about schools and education at newspapers in Huntington,
West Virginia; Utica, New York; Savannah, Georgia, and Columbus, Ohio.
She most recently worked for the Chicago Tribune. Contact.
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_Jodi S. Cohen [[link removed]] is a
Senior Editor for ProPublica. Her work has examined the widespread
practice of police ticketing students at school for minor infractions
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seclusion and restraint in Illinois public schools
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systemic problems in Michigan’s juvenile justice system after a
girl was incarcerated during the pandemic for not doing her online
school work [[link removed]] and a college
financial aid scam
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Contact. [[link removed]]_

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