WASHINGTON, D.C. — The American Civil Liberties Union criticized President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a LinkedIn post, accusing the administration of weakening federal protections against discrimination in schools and leaving thousands of student civil rights complaints unresolved.
The post stated that “President Trump and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon are weakening students’ ability to challenge discrimination” and urged Congress to “demand that the Department of Education ensures equal educational opportunities for all students.”
The ACLU post highlighted findings from a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee minority staff report titled Justice Denied: How Trump’s Office for Civil Rights Reached a 12-Year Low in Protecting Students from Discrimination. The report stated that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights “reached the fewest resolution agreements in at least 12 years.”
According to the report, the administration fired “299 out of 575 OCR staff and shuttered 7 of 12 regional civil rights offices” in March 2025. The report stated that although courts later intervened, “the damage was done” and that “thousands of students who were discriminated against have been left without help, without answers and without justice.”
The report described OCR as the federal agency students rely on “when a child with a disability is denied the education they are legally entitled to,” “when a child is sexually harassed at school,” or “when a student is subjected to racial harassment, antisemitism, Islamophobia, or other shared ancestry discrimination.”
The agency is responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws in schools, colleges and universities and investigating complaints of discrimination from students and families nationwide.
The report found that despite nearly 12,000 pending civil rights cases at the start of 2025, OCR reached only 112 resolution agreements during the year, “providing meaningful relief to students in just 1 percent of pending cases.”
It also stated that OCR reached “0 resolution agreements involving sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion or restraint, racial harassment or discriminatory school discipline” despite thousands of pending complaints in those categories.
According to the report, resolution agreements fell “78% — from 507 in 2024 to just 112 in 2025.” The report further stated that “students with disabilities…have been abandoned,” noting that disability discrimination resolutions dropped by 78.7% compared to the previous year.
The report stated that many pending cases involved allegations of schools failing to respond to racial harassment, disability discrimination and sexual misconduct.
It described cases involving “a Black student being called the n-word daily by classmates while teachers did nothing” and “a student reporting a sexual assault on campus and a school administrator dismissing it.”
The report also stated that while OCR enforcement declined, the agency “received the same amount of taxpayer funds as in years past.” According to the report, more than $14 million appropriated to OCR in fiscal year 2025 expired without being used.
The report stated that instead of using the funding to process complaints or hire investigators, “Secretary McMahon let funding appropriated on a bipartisan basis to carry out OCR’s crucial mission simply disappear.”
The report additionally stated that OCR resolved “0 sexual harassment cases and 0 sexual violence cases via resolution agreement” despite hundreds of pending cases. It also reported that “Title VI enforcement against racial discrimination has come to a complete halt,” with “0 racial harassment cases” resolved through agreements in 2025.
In its conclusion, the report stated that the Trump administration had turned the Office for Civil Rights “into a tool for political persecution rather than student protection.” The report added that “thousands of students of color, students with disabilities and survivors of sexual assault have been abandoned” by the federal government’s civil rights enforcement system.
Follow the Vanguard on Social Media – X, Instagram and Facebook. Subscribe the Vanguard News letters. To make a tax-deductible donation, please visit davisvanguard.org/donate or give directly through ActBlue. Your support will ensure that the vital work of the Vanguard continues.
