When Donald Trump’s administration ended in 2020, two-thirds of Americans believed that Trump had increased racial tensions in the U.S. The Trump administration’s sustained assault on political, civic, and legal efforts to promote racial justice and the administration’s transparent pursuit of an agenda based on white supremacy had pushed the country to its breaking point.

Today, Trump and his supporters have doubled down on this agenda. As part of a larger backlash against racial justice efforts that ignited in the aftermath of the 2020 killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, the 2025 Presidential Transition Project has now made its anti- diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies a cornerstone of their continued attacks on racial equity and free speech.

In addition to abandoning civil rights enforcement on behalf of marginalized groups, Trump and his supporters plan to intensify right wing attacks on education, employment, and economic opportunity initiatives, and to censor academic discussions about race, gender, and systemic oppression. At the ACLU, we won’t retreat. We’re prepared to challenge the Trump administration’s policies at every level of government. Learn more in our breakdown:

The Facts: Based on Trump’s campaign promises – and the detailed policy proposals of Project 2025 – we can expect a second Trump administration to supercharge efforts to reverse gains in civil rights and racial justice in America. Specifically, Trump has promised to continue his attacks on so-called “divisive concepts” and take federal funding from schools with curricula, books, or classes that address race, racism, gender, and sexuality. Trump has also promised to eliminate school administrator positions that oversee DEI initiatives, and to resuscitate the discredited 1776 Commission, which was a presidential advisory committee created in September 2020 by then-President Trump that was tasked with “restoring patriotic education in schools.”

Emboldened by the 2023 repeal of affirmative action in college admissions, a second Trump administration intends to abandon efforts to advance and legally defend affirmative action and DEI policies within military academies, federal minority contracting programs, and other federal programs shown to open opportunities – as well as create inclusive education and workplace environments – unfairly denied to people of color, women, and other marginalized groups. On the regulatory side, a second Trump administration would not only refuse to enforce civil rights regulations on behalf of individuals from historically marginalized groups, but to actively weaken these protections in housing, education, health care, and other essential resources.

Ultimately, Trump has made clear that his goal is to eradicate all programs designed to address profound and persistent inequalities in American life – with the effect of further entrenching, and indeed worsening, systemic inequality.

Why It Matters: Policies that seek to eradicate DEI programs, restrict conversations about race or gender in the classroom, or otherwise attack civil rights efforts are not only unlawful, but undermine our ability to repair decades of discriminatory practices and thrive as a nation. At the state level, we know that efforts to ban books or school curricula addressing the reality of systemic discrimination not only trample on students’ and educators’ constitutional rights, especially their First Amendment rights, but also threaten the retention and academic success of all students.

At the federal level, we know that a second Trump administration would dismantle or refuse to enforce critical DEI programs and initiatives that date back decades. In public health, for example, there are significant disparities in care that are closely linked to structural racism. To remedy historical discrimination and address health outcome disparities, public and private scholarship and fellowship programs have been set up to support pathways to the medical profession for underrepresented medical professionals. Without support for these programs, the race-gap in healthcare would only widen.

Trump on DEI and Anti-Discrimination Law

The Trump campaign’s rhetoric threatens to unravel decades of racial equality progress. We plan to fight back.

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

How We Got Here: From 2017-2021, the Trump administration used its federal legal and policy authority to bolster far-right attacks on educational and economic opportunity initiatives. For example, the administration used its investigative and legal authority to target efforts by the private sector and institutions of higher education to address inequality.

Specifically, the prior Trump administration consistently subverted traditional legal tools and principles designed to combat unlawful discrimination. It ceased enforcement of, and attempted to dismantle, disparate impact liability — a bedrock tool for effective civil rights enforcement. The administration also revoked federal guidance designed to address race- and disability-based discrimination in student discipline policies and practices and banned, by executive order, the U.S. Armed Forces, federal agencies, federal contractors, and recipients of federal grants from providing employees with trainings related to race and gender discrimination.

In the Trump administration’s final days, it also launched the 1776 Report, which deceptively recasts the civil rights movement as corrupting progress toward racial equality. Designed to “restore patriotic education in schools,” the 1776 Report compared progressivism to fascism, claimed the civil rights movement embraced ideas similar to those held by defenders of slavery, and sought to downplay the legacy of racism in U.S. history. Historians uniformly condemned the report, pointing out that it was littered with factual inaccuracies, partisan politics, and a lack of serious scholarship.

Our Roadmap: The ACLU filed more than 430 legal actions against the Trump administration, including many lawsuits against that administration’s anti-DEI policies — from fair housing to book bans. If Trump is reelected, we’ll continue to use the courts to combat these discriminatory tactics. That includes asking the court to block any administration’s efforts to undermine the Fair Housing Act.

We will also push Congress to consistently vote against anti-DEI bills and efforts to strip federal funding from such programs, and to amplify through hearings and public statements how these programs work and the reasons why these programs remain critical. We’ll also work with states and municipalities to advance civil rights protections in the public sector and defend inclusive curricula at the K-12 level. Lastly, we’ll provide critical guidance and support to institutions and school districts to combat historical discrimination that is still constitutionally sound, despite aggressive messaging to the contrary.

What Our Experts Say: “Trump and his supporters leveraged last year’s Supreme Court decision on affirmative action to undermine and create confusion around DEI initiatives – even though DEI and affirmative action are two different issues. The ACLU is determined to educate the public on this racist agenda, and continue to defend vital efforts that counteract historical discrimination and unequal access to opportunities. – ReNika Moore, director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program

“It’s important for Americans to realize that Trump’s plans to intensify efforts to eliminate inclusive education practices and policies is a First Amendment issue, as much as it is a civil rights issue. Trump and his supporters are proposing to control what we think and learn by using the government to censor a viewpoint it doesn’t like out of existence.” – Kim Conway, senior policy counsel

What You Can Do Today: The ACLU has challenged classroom censorship laws and book bans across the country. Today, we’re expanding on that work by pushing back against attempts to restrict DEI programs. We won’t stand for the erasure of marginalized communities in our schools. Join us in this critical fight for free speech and equitable education.

Fifty five years after a police raid at a popular drag bar in Greenwich Village led to the Stonewall uprising, interactions between police and queer folks can certainly appear a lot different than they did in the 1960s. The laws banning crossdressing, obscenity, and same-sex sexual relations that enabled police to harass LGBTQ people have largely been overturned in court. The pride parades that commemorate the Stonewall uprising now often have a police escort. Many police departments have hired LGBTQ community liaisons, fly rainbow Pride flags in June, and issue proclamations honoring Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Far from signs of progress, however, these symbolic gestures obscure the many ways police harassment, profiling, and violence continue to target sexual and gender minorities, with poor, Black, and transgender people often facing the worst of it. In our new report, Policing Progress: Findings from a National Survey of LGBTQ+ People’s Experiences with Law Enforcement, we found that routine and widespread mistreatment by police continues to fuel mistrust between LGBTQ people and the very law enforcement that claims to protect and serve them.

Using survey data collected by NORC at the University of Chicago, the ACLU, in collaboration with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Irvine, found disparities between LGBTQ people and non-LGBTQ people, and within the LGBTQ community in reported experiences with police. As a group, LGBTQ people reported more adverse treatment by police than non-LGBTQ people. This is particularly pronounced among bisexual, transgender, and nonbinary people, who more commonly experience insulting language and physical force from the police.

More than one in four (27 percent) transgender people report experiencing physical force by police. Black transgender people were the most likely to have experienced physical force by the police among all LGBTQ people. Transgender and nonbinary respondents (45 percent and 33 percent, respectively) were significantly more likely than LGBTQ cisgender men (15 percent) to have experienced insulting language by the police.

This kind of mistreatment can range from misgendering transgender people, profiling someone as a sex worker because of their gender expression, subjecting them to needless physical searches, and even physical and sexual violence. For example, earlier this month, a transgender man won a $275,000 settlement after being forced by New York prison officials to undergo four separate and illegal genital examinations. A 2021 survey of transgender people currently held in New York prisons found an astonishing three quarters reported at least one act of sexual violence by a corrections officer.

The ACLU has combated instances of police abuse in the LGBTQ community, including in 2019, when the New York Civil Liberties Union reached a settlement with the NYPD on behalf of Linda Dominguez, a 45-year-old transgender Latina, after they charged her with “false personation” for carrying an ID with her former name (or “deadname”) on it. Officers chained her to a pipe and verbally harassed her following her arrest. Two years prior, in 2017, the ACLU of the District of Columbia settled with the Metropolitan Police Department on behalf of Lourdes Ashley Hunter, executive director and co-founder of the Trans Women of Color Collective, after police entered her home without a warrant, physically assaulted her, and left her with multiple injuries.

It’s no wonder then that our report also found widespread mistrust among LGBTQ people towards law enforcement, with the very members of the LGBTQ community that face the highest rates of victimization reporting the least willingness to seek help from police.

Only 69 percent of bisexual and 60 percent of queer people indicated that they would call the police for help in the future, compared to 80 percent of gays and lesbians and 87 percent of straight, cisgender people. Less than two-thirds of Latine LGBTQ people surveyed said they would be likely to call the police for help in the future, compared to nearly three-fourths of white LGBTQ people. Less than two-thirds of transgender respondents were likely to call the police for help in the future, compared to 82 percent of cisgender LGBQ men. Approximately one-quarter of nonbinary people were willing to call the police for help.

At the ACLU, our advocacy recommendations have centered around the multiple, concrete steps communities and local governments can take to help ensure the safety of LGBTQ people from police harassment and violence, including:

• Reducing negative encounters between police and community members. Law enforcement must end policies and practices that require or incentivize officers to engage in aggressive tactics, such as quotas for citations or arrests, stop-and-frisk, and ceasing enforcement of consensual sex work.
• Adopting specific policies and practices that ensure fair and equitable treatment of LGBTQ+ people. We urge police to place prohibitions on the use of explicitly hateful language and frisks and searches aimed at determining someone’s gender.
• Reconsidering police presence in public LGBTQ+ spaces and events, such as pride parades and festivals.
• Implementing strong oversight with meaningful community involvement to provide transparent and accessible complaint processes and require law enforcement agencies to take corrective action when complaints suggest a pattern of problems.
• Repealing existing laws that explicitly criminalize LGBTQ+ people and expression, and opposing any proposed anti-LGBTQ+ laws, including those that would criminalize necessary medical care or criminalize drag.

Many states continue to advance laws that seek to further police LGBTQ life, including efforts to censor drag performers and criminalize transgender people who use public restrooms consistent with their gender identity. As outlined in our memo, Trump on LGBTQ Rights, former President Donald Trump and the extremists behind Project 2025 want to go even further, weaponizing the federal government to criminalize gender nonconformity and ordering the Department of Justice to repeal protections for incarcerated transgender people.

But many of these problems are perpetuated at the local level–often by the very same cities and municipalities who proudly host pride parades or fly rainbow flags on their police cruisers. LGBTQ people and our allies shouldn’t be fooled by flashy but shallow shows of support or lofty social media statements from police departments about “inclusion.” More than half a century after Stonewall, communities have a duty to move past symbolism and move us closer to a future built on safety, respect, and freedom.

Emily Greytak, ACLU; Jordan Grasso, University of California, Irvine; and Stefan Vogler, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign contributed to this article.

Today, the Supreme Court declined to issue a ruling in Idaho and Moyle, et al. v. United States. Instead, it sent the case back down to the lower courts where anti-abortion extremists will continue to fight to strip pregnant people of the basic right to emergency care, including when their life is at risk.

While the court’s decision temporarily restores the ability of doctors in Idaho to provide emergency abortions required under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act —EMTALA— by dismissing the case without affirming once and for all that pregnant people have a right to the emergency abortion care they need to protect their health and lives, the court continues to put pregnant patients at unnecessary risk.

Below, we break down why the case matters, and what happens next.

EMTALA requires emergency rooms to provide stabilizing treatment to patients in emergency situations. Since it was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, the federal government–across Democratic and Republican administrations–has consistently recognized that EMTALA requires hospitals to provide emergency abortion care to any patient who needs it. For nearly 40 years, EMTALA has been a crucial tool in guaranteeing the right to emergency care for pregnant patients in need.

Although the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade did not diminish these longstanding federal protections, extremist politicians still tried to prevent people experiencing emergency pregnancy complications from getting care in emergency rooms. In this case, Idaho, which has a near total abortion ban, went all the way to the Supreme Court for the power to criminalize emergency abortions required under EMTALA.

The ACLU and the Cooley Law Firm filed a friend-of-the-court brief in defense of EMTALA. We explained that the law clearly requires hospitals to provide emergency abortion care, regardless of state abortion bans like Idaho’s and others, and that pregnant people cannot be excluded from EMTALA’s protections. The court’s concurring opinion authored by Justice Elena Kagan, and joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in part, echoes the arguments we laid out in our brief.

The Supreme Court had the opportunity to affirm that every pregnant person in this country is entitled to the emergency care they need to protect their health and lives, and it failed to do so. The court’s refusal to safeguard the right to emergency abortion care–and put an unequivocal end to extremist attacks by anti-abortion politicians on this essential health care –puts pregnant patients at risk and devalues equality under the law.

Two Years Post-Roe: Life in the Aftermath

Two Years Post-Roe: Life in the Aftermath

On this episode, we’re going back into our archives to share an episode that unfortunately still has deep resonance today. Last year, we asked you what a year without Roe has been like in your lives and you responded in droves. Today, with abortio...

On this episode, we’re going back into our archives to share an episode that unfortunately still has deep resonance today. Last year, we asked you what a year without Roe has been like in your lives and you responded in droves. Today, with abortio...

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Importantly, the court’s order does nothing to stop the chaos and confusion unleashed by abortion bans across the country, which still prevent providers from giving appropriate medical care to patients when they need it most. While the court’s order does provide a temporary reprieve for pregnant patients in Idaho facing medical emergencies, it also allows extremist politicians in the case to continue to fight to put doctors in jail simply for providing essential care. And, alarmingly, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, wrote a dissenting opinion that provides a roadmap for just how they would strip pregnant people of the right to emergency abortion care should this case return to the Supreme Court.

The dissenting opinion also indicates a willingness to endorse an extreme strategy to give legal rights to embryos and fetuses that will override the rights of the pregnant person, and could lead not only to a national abortion ban, but bans on other forms of reproductive health care like fertility treatment and birth control.

This case proves that this battle is far from over. Extremist politicians are coming for our reproductive freedom and will not stop until abortion, including emergency abortion, is banned in all 50 states. They already went all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to put doctors in jail for providing life-and health-saving emergency abortion care, and they will do it again if we let them.

At the ACLU, we’ll continue to use every tool at our disposal to fight attacks on our bodily autonomy. We urge Congress to act now and pass federal protections for abortion rights that will end extreme bans in states and protect access to care nationwide.