“We’ve seen similar efforts like this before, and we’ve seen that Trump administration lose them,” Janai Nelson, director-counsel at Legal Defense Fund, told theGrio.
A coalition of civil and human rights groups is hitting back at President Donald Trump and his administration over executive orders barring diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility funding and LGBTQ-related health care.
The Legal Defense Fund and Lambda Legal are representing the nonprofit advocacy organizations — National Urban League, the National Fair Housing Alliance, and the AIDS Foundation of Chicago — in a legal challenge to three of Trump’s anti-equity executive orders. The orders call for a range of actions like eliminating DEIA programs (calling them “illegal” and “immoral discrimination”) — including terminating grants and contracts — and reversing course on the federal government’s recognition of transgender people.
Janai Nelson, director-counsel at Legal Defense Fund, said Trump’s weeks-old orders have already “caused harm” to the three plaintiff organizations, as they are not able to provide necessary advocacy or support due to scaled-down funding. This includes advocacy for access to jobs and health care, economic empowerment and combating housing and mortgage lending discrimination, which continues to remain a threat in Black, brown and LGBTQ+ communities.
“Instead of supporting our clients’ efforts to level the playing field and protect everyday Americans, the Trump administration is punishing them for their efforts to improve the health of our economy overall by ensuring that everyone has equal access to resources and opportunity,” Nelson said during a press call announcing the lawsuit. “The Trump administration is actively weaponizing the U.S. government to reverse decades of progress toward a better, more equal, more inclusive America where everyone can have their basic needs met.”
Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, said Trump’s orders on DEI, which include rolling back executive enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, are “malicious, unlawful [and] unconstitutional.” He continued, “[It’s] a direct assault on 70 years of progress that this nation has made, dating all the way back to May 17, 1954, when the Legal Defense Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, won the Brown v. the Board of Education decision.”
Jose Abrigo, HIV project director at Lambda Legal, explained that the executive actions on DEI and transgender rights are intersectional — a connection that Black, brown, and LGBTQ communities must see.
“The fight to end racism, the HIV epidemic and anti-transgender bias are inseparable. HIV justice is racial justice. HIV justice is LGBTQ justice. HIV justice is trans justice,” said Abrigo during the press call. He continued, “Black and Latin communities and LGBTQ people are disproportionately impacted by HIV due to systemic barriers that limit access to health care, economic stability, and housing orders that erase equity efforts [and] reinforce these injustices, making it harder to reach people who need the services the most.”
Abrigo also emphasized that Trump’s orders “attacking DEI and gender-inclusive policies are not just an assault on civil rights; they are an attack on public health.”
President Trump and his White House have repeatedly pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling that blocked race-based college admissions, also known as affirmative action, as legal justification for his anti-DEI agenda. The administration argues that, essentially, programs designed to provide equity for Black and Latino Americans, for example, are discriminatory to white Americans. There have been legal cases using that framework that have found legal success in blocking President Joe Biden’s debt relief program for Black farmers and upending services for Black and brown businesses provided by the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA).
Nelson of the Legal Defense Fund told theGrio that despite the Trump administration’s attempt to point to the Supreme Court’s rulings on affirmative action and subsequent court decisions that have “upheld some of the critiques around DEIA,” there have been “more that have actually said the … decision is cabined to the admissions processes at Harvard and UNC.” She added, “That holding does not extend beyond that particular set of facts.”
The civil rights attorney said the Trump administration is “extreme” and attempting to “push for a different interpretation” of the affirmative action ruling. She explained, “They cannot do that by fiat. They cannot do that by executive order. They have to go through the court process.”
Nelson said LDF and Lambda Legal are “very confident” in their legal case against the Trump administration. Both legal firms pointed out that they filed similar challenges against Trump’s first administration when he signed an order barring workplace diversity trainings due to so-called “race and sex stereotyping.”
“We’ve seen similar efforts like this before, and we’ve seen that Trump administration lose them,” Nelson told theGrio. “We have every confidence that if the justice system acts correctly and if judges apply the law to the facts, we will have similar outcomes here.”
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