The Justice Department on Tuesday joined a lawsuit challenging a city program offering reparations for civil rights violations to Black residents in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, arguing that the aid program amounted to racial discrimination.
The Justice Department filed a motion to join a lawsuit, filed by the conservative activist group Judicial Watch, representing descendants of people who had lived in Evanston but could not apply for the program because they were not Black. The suit argues that the racial requirement is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — a statute aimed at making formerly enslaved Black people equal citizens of the United States.
The filing by the Justice Department targets a relatively small program in Evanston, a city of 76,000 known for its liberal politics where roughly a quarter of the population is Black or interracial. The city has, so far, distributed $5 million in cash payments and housing grants to 212 applicants.
It is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to go after programs meant to help Black Americans and other minorities that faced discrimination, attacking those policies as “woke handouts based on race.” President Trump said in an interview earlier this year that he believed civil rights-era protections resulted in white people being “very badly treated.”
“Under the pretext of paying reparations for events more than 100 years ago, the city of Evanston has chosen to distribute millions of dollars in cash and housing benefits to people because of the color of their skin,” Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general overseeing the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. “It is race discrimination, pure and simple. And it is illegal.”
Mayor Daniel Bliss did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but told the local outlet Evanston Now that “we stand behind our first-in-the-nation reparations program, are confident in its constitutionality, and look forward to defending it in court.”
Eligible applicants of the reparations program could be descendants of a Black Evanston resident who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969; or they could have experienced housing discrimination because of city policies after 1969. Successful applicants can qualify for up to $25,000 in grants.
Unlike some reparations proposals that aim to widely distribute aid to the descendants of people who were enslaved and brought from Africa, the program in Evanston is more narrowly targeted to residents who can show that they or their ancestors were victims of redlining and other discriminatory housing practices in the city that limited the neighborhoods where Black people could live.
Even so, the program has attracted scrutiny since its inception. Critics, such as the Cato Institute, have questioned its constitutionality and said that restrictive housing practices were in place before and after the program’s 50-year window.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was aimed at eliminating those discriminatory housing practices. In its filing on Tuesday, the Justice Department said that the reparations program violated the Fair Housing Act “ by offering and providing financial assistance for housing because of race.”
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