According to a new report, the United States federal government has taken a massive step back from its role in protecting civil rights across the country.
On Thursday, the nonprofit Human Rights Watch issued a 112-page analysis of the government’s civil rights activities from January 2025 through the start of 2026, a period that captures the opening months of President Donald Trump’s second term.
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The report concludes that the federal agencies responsible for stopping discrimination have largely been gutted of their staff.
Additionally, top-down directives by Trump have de-emphasised the federal government’s role in protecting civil rights across the country, according to the group.
“While claiming to protect all Americans, the administration is rolling back systems that communities have long turned to for relief,” Trey Walk, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
Which agencies did the report analyse?
The report examines four key agencies within the federal government dedicated to civil rights.
They include the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, the Office of Civil Rights at the Education Department, the Fair Housing Office at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Human Rights Watch spoke with current and former federal workers, lawyers, complainants and community groups who had been involved in cases alleging discrimination.
It also reviewed court filings and federal agency directives that illustrated the pivot in priorities under the second Trump administration.
What is the history of civil rights enforcement in the federal government?
The federal government’s role in civil rights protections goes back centuries, starting with the US Constitution.
In 1791, Congress ratified an addition to the country’s founding document that established civil protections like the freedom of religion. Those first 10 amendments became known as the Bill of Rights.
Over the decades, more amendments were added, most notably after the US Civil War, to guarantee rights like equal protection under the law.
While the Constitution contains explicit language about religion and race, critics point out that there is no language that confers equal protection based on sex or gender.
The history of the Department of Justice is closely entwined with the need to enforce civil rights law after the Civil War.
Created in 1870, the department addressed several needs, including a push to professionalise and centralise the country’s federal law enforcement. But it also helped prosecute violent white supremacist groups at a time when local authorities, particularly in southern states, sometimes refused to.
The US Civil Rights Movement, starting in the 1950s, also spurred a surge in federal infrastructure. It was the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for instance, that established a dedicated civil rights division within the Justice Department.
How did federal policy change under Trump?
Trump’s second term ushered in a backlash towards policies broadly considered to be part of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” movement, or DEI.
That movement gained popularity in the early 2020s, particularly after the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, sparked a public reckoning over racial inequality.
Trump, however, has called DEI “racially discriminatory”. During his campaign for a second term, he argued that there was a “definite anti-white feeling in this country”.
Since starting his second term, Trump has sought to undo policies that his administration argues give unfair advantages to demographics like women and minorities.
In addition, federal agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division suspended certain cases they were pursuing, including some involving sexual harassment and transgender rights.
New investigations were opened instead, including against the footwear giant Nike, which was accused this year of discrimination against white employees.
In May 2025, the Department of Justice also announced it would halt investigations and reform agreements involving police departments accused of racial discrimination.
Such measures had been taken in places like Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, after public outcry over the police killings of unarmed Black people, including Floyd.
What did the Human Rights Watch report find?
The report chronicled an overall weakening in the federal bodies designed to protect civil rights.
Job cuts and resignations were part of that trend. The Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, for instance, boasted about 365 lawyers in January 2025, when Trump took office.
By the end of that year, three-quarters of those lawyers had left the agency, an exodus driven by what Human Rights Watch called a “coordinated effort to undermine career staff”.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department told Al Jazeera its Civil Rights Division “remains dedicated to protecting the rights of all Americans”.
The department also said it had added 100 personnel since the 2025 departures.
According to the spokesperson, the Civil Rights Division is currently focused on “protecting religious liberty, Second Amendment rights, and women’s and girls’ spaces, standing against illegal race-based policymaking and DEI, and defending parents’ fundamental right to direct their children’s upbringing and education”.
What other offices were affected?
Other agencies in the Human Rights Watch report likewise saw a decrease in their ranks as well as a reduction in their civil rights work.
The Office of Fair Housing went from 31 staffers to 11 by mid-2025. Some 115 complaints prepared by the office and referred to the Justice Department for possible legal action were quashed, according to the report.
At the Department of Education, the Office for Civil Rights initially had 568 workers across 12 offices when Trump took office in 2025. Within a few months, seven of those offices were shuttered, and half of the civil rights-related workers were gone.
Between May and September 2025, the office dismissed about 90 percent of the nearly 10,000 complaints it received, a higher rate than it would have in the past, the report said.
What has been the impact of these changes?
Human Rights Watch found that many victims and communities grappling with discrimination no longer had the benefit of a federal agency to help them in their cases.
One community housing group told Human Rights Watch that the Department of Housing and Urban Development no longer responds in a timely fashion to reported instances of anti-LGBTQ discrimination.
Some federal agencies also appear to have walked away from their role in monitoring discrimination and overseeing reforms around the country, according to the report.
The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has a long history of investigating discrimination claims and working with school districts to enact change.
But Human Rights Watch observed that the office has largely stopped dealing with complaints under Trump.
While the Office of Civil Rights required policy changes or monitoring in response to 336 cases in the first half of 2024, only 59 cases received such a remedy over a similar period in 2025.
In Springfield, Massachusetts, for instance, parents complained after white students held a mock “slave auction” on the social media platform Snapchat, where they bid for the sale of their fellow Black students. That case is no longer being pursued by the Office of Civil Rights as of last year.
