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Court ruling further complicates Trump's anti-DEI push

Court ruling further complicates Trump's anti-DEI push

Yahoo26-04-2025

President Trump's plans to rid the country's education system of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) were thrown further into chaos this week when a judge ruled against the Education Department's directives.
States, fiercely divided on the issue, were already dealing with a delayed certification deadline and murky enforcement mechanisms before federal Judge Landya McCafferty issued her preliminary injunction on Trump's anti-DEI measures.
'Thankfully, many schools and districts and colleges and universities have been waiting to see what would happen because they knew and understood that what they were being asked to do was blatantly unlawful and nonsensical,' said Liz King, senior director of education equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
'And so, hopefully this gives the assurance that schools need that they should not be bending to the whims of this administration,' King added.
On Feb. 14, the Department of Education sent a 'Dear Colleague' letter to universities, saying they could risk losing federal funding if they do not get rid of DEI efforts.
Weeks later, state education and K-12 district leaders were told they needed to certify their schools had no DEI programs or also risk losing federal funding.
The Education Department also created a 'DEI portal' to allow parents and others to report programs or initiatives they feel are in violation of Trump's executive orders.
All these efforts resulted in lawsuits and were blocked by three judges on Thursday, including two that were appointed by Trump.
District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, called the efforts unconstitutionally vague and said the letter did not 'delineate between a lawful DEI practice and an unlawful one.'
The Education Department is likely to appeal the decision, with supporters encouraging it to get more specific when it does.
'As part of the appeal, my guess is that they are going to point […] at the actual practices that result in racial discrimination,' said Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman senior research fellow in education policy at the Heritage Foundation.
'From teacher trainings to types of programs that compel or ask someone to state that they are oppressive based on their skin color or otherwise […] some sort of racial favoritism,' Butcher added. 'Frankly, it's a step in the process.'
The Hill has reached out to the Department of Education for comment.
The lack of clarity on DEI in schools has been an issue since Education Secretary Linda McMahon's confirmation hearing, where she was unable to say if classes focusing on Black history would be allowed under her leadership.
In the case of the 'Dear Colleague' letter, the department had to send out a follow-up memo after some universities were unclear if the guidance meant student groups based on race or ethnicity were still allowed.
Meanwhile, multiple blue states were openly refusing to certify that their schools were DEI-free.
'As noted at the outset, MDE [Minnesota Department of Education] has already provided the requisite guarantee that it has and will comply with Title VI and its implementing regulation, and that includes our assurance that we do and will comply with Supreme Court cases interpreting the same. We submit this letter to serve as our response to this specific request,' Minnesota wrote to the federal government.
The Department of Education is seeking to expand on the 2023 affirmative action Supreme Court ruling that said universities could not take race into account in admissions, holding that the decision reaches beyond the student application process.
'Unfortunately, we have seen too many schools flout or outright violate these obligations, including by using DEI programs to discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another based on identity characteristics in clear violation of Title VI,' Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, wrote in the K-12 certification letter.
Federal funding only makes up around 10 percent of money that goes to K-12 schools, although lower-income districts get a bit more help.
At universities, the Trump administration has shown it is not afraid to pull millions or even billions of dollars in federal funding from schools it alleges have committed civil rights violations, even before any investigation takes place.
One of those schools, Harvard University, is suing the administration over funding cuts that were announced after it refused to bow to a list of demands from Trump, including eliminating DEI policies.
The day after the suit was filed, the leaders of more than 100 colleges and universities, including Cornell, Tufts and Princeton, issued a joint letter condemning Trump's 'political interference' and 'coercive use of public research funding.'
But as some colleges have lost funding, others have preemptively began dismantling some of their DEI efforts.
The University of Michigan said last month it would be closing its DEI offices.
'I understand the fear […] They've basically been blackmailing institutions with federal funds. They've created deliberate chaos with the [executive orders] and vague instructions so that people are preemptively complying with things,' said Andrea Abrams, executive director of the Defending American Values Coalition.
'The reasons [they] are afraid are sound, but the reasons to be brave are also sound,' she added.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Analysis: Trump's top general just undercut his ‘invasion' claims
Analysis: Trump's top general just undercut his ‘invasion' claims

CNN

time4 minutes ago

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Analysis: Trump's top general just undercut his ‘invasion' claims

One of the problems with making a series of brazen and hyperbolic claims is that it can be hard to keep everyone on your team on the same page. And few Trump administration claims have been as brazen as the idea that the Venezuelan government has engineered an invasion of gang members into the United States. This claim forms the basis of the administration's controversial efforts to rapidly deport a bunch of people it claimed were members of the gang Tren de Aragua – without due process. But one of the central figures responsible for warding off such invasions apparently didn't get the memo. At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman retired Lt. Gen. Dan Caine acknowledged that the United States isn't currently facing such a threat. 'I think at this point in time, I don't see any foreign state-sponsored folks invading,' Caine said in response to Democratic questioning. This might sound like common sense; of course the United States isn't currently under invasion by a foreign government. You'd probably have heard something about that on the news. But the administration has said – repeatedly and in court – that it has been. When Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to rapidly deport migrants without due process, that law required such a foreign 'invasion' or 'predatory incursion' to make his move legal. And Trump said that's what was happening. 'The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States,' reads the proclamation from Trump. It added that Tren de Aragua's actions came 'both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.' So the White House said Tren de Aragua was acting in concert with the Maduro regime to invade; Caine now says 'state-sponsored folks' aren't invading. Some flagged Caine's comment as undermining Trump's claims of a foreign 'invasion' in Los Angeles. Trump has regularly applied that word to undocumented migrants. But the inconsistency is arguably more significant when it comes to Trump's claims about the Venezuelan migrants. Perhaps the administration would argue that Trump has halted the invasion and it is no longer happening; Caine was speaking in the present tense. Caine did go on to cite others who might have different views. 'But I'll be mindful of the fact that there has been some border issues throughout time, and defer to DHS who handles the border along the nation's contiguous outline,' he said. But if an invasion had been happening recently, it seems weird not to mention that. And if the invasion is over, that would seem to undercut the need to keep trying to use the Alien Enemies Act. The Department of Homeland Security is certainly not in the camp of no invasion. On Wednesday, DHS posted on Facebook an image with Uncle Sam that reads: 'Report all foreign invaders' with a phone number for ICE. When asked about the image and whether the use of the term 'foreign invaders' had been used previously, DHS pointed CNN to a number of posts from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller using terms like 'invade' or 'invaders' when referring to undocumented immigrants. Plenty of Trump administration figures have gone to bat for this claim. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said soon after Trump's proclamation that Tren de Aragua gang members 'have been sent here by the hostile Maduro regime in Venezuela.' Then-national security adviser Michael Waltz claimed Maduro was emptying his prisons 'in a proxy manner to influence and attack the United States.' We soon learned that the intelligence community had concluded Venezuela had not directed the gang. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood by Trump's claim. 'Yes, that's their assessment,' Rubio said last month about the intelligence community. 'They're wrong.' Trump administration border czar Tom Homan has said the gang was an 'arm of the Maduro regime,' and that Maduro's regime was 'involved with sending thousands of Venezuelans to this country to unsettle it.' The question of Venezuela's purported involvement actually hasn't been dealt with much by the courts. A series of judges have moved to block the administration's Alien Enemies Act gambit, but they've generally ruled that way because of the lack of an 'invasion' or 'predatory incursion' – without delving much into the more complex issue of whether such a thing might somehow have ties to Maduro's government. One of the judges to rule in that fashion was a Trump appointee, US District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. So the intelligence community and a bunch of judges – including a Trump-appointed one – have rebutted the claim the underlies this historic effort to set aside due process. And now, the man Trump installed as his top general seems to have undercut it too.

‘We've lost the culture war on climate'
‘We've lost the culture war on climate'

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time7 minutes ago

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‘We've lost the culture war on climate'

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