Trump's Justice Department Sues To Halt The Nation's First City Reparations Program, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That A Government Could Still Pay To Repair A Harm It Had Documented Causing

WASHINGTON. The Department of Justice moved Wednesday to halt the first reparations program ever enacted by an American city, resolving a long-standing concern within the administration that a local government might still be permitted to repair a harm it had spent decades inflicting.

The program, launched in Evanston, Illinois, in 2021, set aside $20 million for Black residents who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 and were denied housing by the city's own ordinances, along with their direct descendants. Eligible recipients receive $25,000 toward a down payment, a mortgage, or home repairs. More than $7 million has been distributed to hundreds of families, funded initially by a local tax on legal marijuana sales, an arrangement officials described as the rare case of two activities the federal government dislikes neatly canceling each other out.

In a filing asking a federal judge to stop the payments, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division argued that compensating the specific people a government discriminated against, for the specific discrimination that government had documented, amounts to discrimination. "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," the Department stated, describing the precise population the city's 1919 to 1969 housing ordinances had also selected by the color of their skin, though for opposite purposes.

The intervention marked a milestone for the Civil Rights Division, a body created in 1957 to enforce the nation's civil rights laws and recently redirected toward the project of locating Americans who are receiving them. "For sixty years this division existed to stop the government from sorting people by race," said one official within the administration, speaking on condition of anonymity because the irony is load-bearing. "Now it exists to stop the government from un-sorting them. We consider that a tidy bookend."

Sources noted that the suit advances a constitutional principle the President has championed at length: that the only truly fair response to documented racial discrimination is to proceed, going forward, as though it never happened and is not happening. Legal scholars observed that the standard, applied evenly, would also forbid the government from ever acknowledging the original harm, a feature several administration attorneys confirmed was not a flaw.

At press time, the Justice Department had filed to block a program that returns public money to the families the public record shows were robbed of it, on the grounds that the families could be identified.