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GOING BACKWARDS ON RIGHTS WITH TRUMP  
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Rebecca Gordon
September 25, 2025
TomDispatch
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_ On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court did its best to murder
what’s left of civil rights in this country. _

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Warning: dangers in the mirror are often closer than they may appear
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In other words, the next few paragraphs may seem to be hyperbole but
are, in fact, expressions of reality (animated by a cold fury).

On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court did its best to murder
what’s left of civil rights in this country. As Charlie Savage of
the _New York Times_ reported
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in an unsigned 6-3 ruling, it overturned a lower court’s order
forbidding ICE and the Border Patrol in Los Angeles from stopping,
interrogating, and detaining people based on any of four factors:
“apparent race or ethnicity; the fact that they speak English with
an accent or speak Spanish; their presence at particular locations
like farms or pickup sites for day laborers; and the type of work they
do.”

Those six conservative justices might as well have stood in front of
the court and set fire to the 1964 Civil Rights Act
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outlawed segregation and discrimination based on race, religion, sex,
or national origin in a wide variety of venues and actions, including
public accommodations, education, the provision of government
services, housing, transportation, and voting. The Civil Rights Act
outlawed exactly the kind of racial profiling now being practiced —
and permitted by our highest court — in the Trump administration’s
war on immigrants.

While they were at it, those six robed arsonists might as well have
burnt the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which outlaws
unreasonable searches and seizures and requires a court-issued warrant
for arrests. They could have added the Fourteenth Amendment to their
bonfire, which was one of three passed and ratified during the
Reconstruction period following the Civil War. Those three amendments
established full citizenship rights for emancipated Blacks and future
generations of U.S. denizens, regardless of race. The Thirteenth
Amendment, of course, outlawed slavery
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and the Fifteenth secured voting rights
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for all (male) citizens regardless of race, color, or previous
conditions of servitude. The Fourteenth
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Amendment, while establishing birthright citizenship, also guarantees
“all persons” (regardless of citizenship status) due process under
the law — including those suspected of being in the country
illegally.

CENTURIES OF STRUGGLE UNDONE

No one gave us those rights. Successive generations of Americans
fought for them, starting in the late 1780s and in the 1791 passage of
the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to our Constitution.
That’s when the Fourth Amendment established the rights that
centuries later would be invoked to prevent people from being stopped
for “driving while Black
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or seeking work while looking Latino. (It’s also when, thanks to the
First Amendment, we secured freedom of speech and the press, which
gives me the right to state publicly, even in the wake of his
despicable assassination, that the founder of Turning Point USA,
Charlie Kirk, built his organization
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on explicit contempt for women, especially women of color, and LGBTQ
people.)

It took a civil war and the deaths of almost 700,000 soldiers on both
sides to end legal slavery in this country and give us those three
Reconstruction amendments, passed between 1865 and 1870.

And it took decades of mostly nonviolent struggle and sacrifice (and
more deaths) to win passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965
Voting Rights Act. Those two laws essentially reiterated the same
rights that had been secured back in the 1860s but had been denied in
practice in the southern states of the former Confederacy.
“Denial” is a weak word for the life-destroying discrimination and
segregation that was then systematically enforced by state-sponsored
terrorism (all too often in the form of lynching) against those
accused of violating the Jim Crow regime of that era.

The Supreme Court had already torn the guts out of the Voting Rights
Act in 2013, deciding in _Shelby County v. Holder_ that states with a
history of race-based voter suppression would no longer have to seek
“preclearance” from the Department of Justice for changes to their
voting procedures. The court’s argument was essentially that voting
discrimination no longer exists in the states named in the 1965 Voting
Rights Act. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, observing
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that ending preclearance was like “throwing away your umbrella in a
rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

The fact that a storm of suppression was indeed still raging became
clear almost immediately, as affected states began passing laws
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making it more difficult for people of color to vote. Ironically,
President Trump’s crew hasn’t yet completely purged the Department
of Justice’s website of support for voting rights. You can, for
instance, still find there a 2023 blog post
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by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke lamenting the
depredations of _Shelby _and praising the Biden administration’s
support for the — never passed — John Lewis Voting Rights
Advancement Act as a remedy.

Now, in a one-paragraph decision, the six right-wing justices,
appointed by a series of Republican presidents including Trump, have
made another contribution to his administration’s all-out attack on
race and gender equality. Justice Brett Kavanaugh found it necessary
to amplify the court’s decision
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lengthy concurrence. In words untethered from the real world, he
wrote:

“The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check
the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people
are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as
construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do
not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal
immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers
learn that the individual they stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise
lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.”

Let me repeat that: “If the officers learn that the individual they
stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,
they promptly let the individual go.” Tell that to Kilmar Abrego
García [[link removed]].

OH, CALIFORNIA

In the last few decades, some very bad ideas have come out of my own
state, California. This may surprise readers who think of Californians
as living in a great blue expanse on the country’s “Left Coast.”
They may think our governor, Gavin Newsom, is an avatar of liberalism.
(Despite my criticisms of the man, I will admit that his recent
trolling [[link removed]] of Donald
Trump’s ALL-CAPS MEDIA STYLE is pretty funny.)

Nevertheless, some seriously bad ideas have triumphed as ballot
propositions here. In 1978, there was Proposition 13, which made it
all but impossible to raise taxes in the state — especially property
taxes, which provide almost half the funding for our public schools.
That “taxpayer revolt” (as it came to be known) spread rapidly to
other states. Then, in 1994, Republican Governor Pete Wilson
transformed his flagging reelection campaign by inflaming White
anxiety about immigration in California. He launched a series of TV
ads [[link removed]] with the tag
line “they keep coming,” a reference to people crossing the
Mexican border looking for work in my state. Weaponizing White anxiety
was something Donald Trump would borrow when he ran for president in
2016, 2020, and 2024.

To ramp up his 1994 gubernatorial campaign, Wilson endorsed the
anti-immigrant Proposition 187
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“Save Our State” initiative. And Californians then indeed did
reelect him, while passing the proposition, which outlawed the
provision of any government services — including health care and
education — to any undocumented immigrant. Government employees at
any level were required to report anyone (including schoolchildren)
they suspected of being in the country illegally. In language
forebodingly similar to the rhetoric of both of Trump’s presidential
campaigns and his two administrations, Proposition 187 began:

“The People of California find and declare as follows:

“That they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused
by the presence of illegal aliens in this state. That they have
suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the
criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a
right to the protection of their government from any person or persons
entering this country unlawfully.”

What happens in California doesn’t always stay in California. As the
_Washington Post_ reported
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25 years later, “Since 1994, 65 initiatives and referendums to
change state immigration laws were attempted via direct democracy
mechanisms.”

Almost immediately, federal courts prevented the implementation of
most parts of Proposition 187. Three decades later, however, the
Supreme Court has effectively validated Proposition 187’s premise,
permitting the use of racial profiling to identify possible “illegal
aliens.”

The right wing wasn’t done with legislating racism in my state. In
1996, Proposition 209
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known by the (completely unironic) ironic title its proponents
gave it, the “California Civil Rights Initiative,” outlawed
affirmative action at any level of government in the state, including
access to public colleges and universities.

Though it faced legal challenges, Proposition 209 remains in force
today. There’s no doubt that earlier Supreme Court decisions,
including the 1978 finding in _University of California v. Bakke_, had
indeed laid the groundwork for it. In it, a 30-year-old White man had
challenged his rejection by the medical school at the University of
California, Davis. He sued and was eventually admitted. In his case,
the court upheld the principle of affirmative action to address racial
or other discrimination against protected classes of persons, but
outlawed specific numerical quotas.

By 2023, however, an ever more right-leaning Supreme Court had ruled
in _Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard _that affirmative action
violates the equal protections guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
As we’ve seen repeatedly, the hard-won legal remedies for racism are
now being turned against both the historic and present-day targets of
racism.

Then, in 1998, another ballot initiative outlawed most bilingual
education in California public schools (though it was finally repealed
at the ballot box in 2016).

DISPARATE IMPACT

By 2003, however, in part because of changes to the demographic makeup
of the electorate, California voters had had enough of legally
weaponizing White anxiety. They roundly rejected Proposition 54, known
as the “Racial Privacy Initiative,” which, as the American Civil
Liberties Union of Northern California put it
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“would have banned most agencies from collecting data on race,
ethnicity and national origin, with disastrous consequences for
health, education, public safety, and civil rights.”

But in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025
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the right-wing strategists for a second Trump presidency made it very
clear that their plans included implementing a national version of the
Racial Privacy Initiative. The author of the section on labor
advocated prohibiting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or
EEOC, from collecting employment data based on race. The mere
existence of such data, he wrote, “can then be used to support a
charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could
lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race discrimination.” In
other words, if you can’t demonstrate racial discrimination in
employment (because you’re enjoined from collecting data on the
subject), then there’s no racial discrimination to remedy. Case
closed, right?

It seems that Donald Trump agrees. In April 2025, he issued an
executive order
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entitled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.” In
it, he noted that “disparate-impact liability all but requires
individuals and businesses to consider race and engage in racial
balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability.” Trump and
his handlers don’t see taking systemic racism and contemporary bias
into consideration as a solution to a problem. Such consideration _is
_the problem. “It not only undermines our national values,” says
the order, “but also runs contrary to equal protection under the law
and, therefore, violates our Constitution.”

Whatever Trump may decree, current employment law (as implied in the
1964 Civil Rights Act, affirmed in 1970 by the Supreme Court in
_Griggs v. Duke Power Co._
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codified in the 1991 Civil Rights Act
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presidency of George H.W. Bush) supports the use of disparate impact.
As of now, plaintiffs can still seek to prove discrimination by
demonstrating the disparate impact of a company’s “facially
neutral” hiring, firing, or promotion policies. How long will it be,
however, before this Supreme Court reverses decades of progress in
equal employment?

We’ve already seen the “disparate impact” of Trump and his
Department of Government Efficiency’s destruction of the federal
workforce, which has disproportionately affected Blacks
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and especially Black women. It’s a major factor explaining why
300,000 Black women have lost jobs
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since Trump took office.

If you have any doubt whether race (and sex) bias continues to exist
at the highest levels in this administration, consider the words
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of a man Trump thought of as
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like a son,” the recently assassinated right-wing firebrand Charlie
Kirk:

“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s
qualified.”

“If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a
moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence,
or is she there because of affirmative action?”

And about a list of prominent Black women, including Supreme Court
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Kirk said: “You do not have the brain
processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go
steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

CIRCLING BACKWARDS?

I used to suggest to my philosophy students that you could view the
last 2,000 years of “western” history as a gradual widening of the
circle of beings who count as full persons. At first, that circle
contained only high-born men. Centuries of struggle saw the inclusion
of men without noble birth, and later without property. Racial
concepts, themselves a human invention, long excluded men who were not
deemed White. Eventually, fitfully, they, too, were admitted to the
circle of personhood. Most recently, women seem to have become
persons, and with that addition, people of a variety of genders and
sexual orientations have also joined the circle.

But right now, six people on the Supreme Court, along with the Trump
administration, are doing all they can to tighten that previously
ever-widening circle of personhood and Donald Trump is on board in a
big-time way. Let us hope that we can stop them from turning that
circle into a noose.

_Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular
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taught for many years in the philosophy department at the University
of San Francisco. Now, semi-retired from teaching, she continues to be
an activist in her faculty union. She is the author of Mainstreaming
Torture
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and American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for
Post-9/11 War Crimes
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_Tom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch in October 2001 as an informal
listserv offering commentary and collected articles from the global
media to a select group of friends and colleagues. In November 2002,
it gained its name and, as a project of the Nation Institute (now the
Type Media Center), became a web-based publication aimed at providing
“a regular antidote to the mainstream media.”_

_In the 18 years since, TomDispatch has regularly published three
original articles weekly on subjects ranging from the American way of
war and this country’s “forever wars” to economic inequality to
the climate crisis._

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