Allegations against Hud are latest sign of administration’s plans to transform enforcement of US civil rights laws
For 57 years, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud) has used a landmark civil rights law to bring lawsuits against discriminatory lenders, landlords and realtors, with the goal of fighting residential segregation.
That work has largely ground to a halt since Donald Trump returned to the White House, two attorneys in the department’s anti-discrimination division said in interviews, as well as a whistleblower report sent to Congress and a lawsuit filed this week.
The president’s appointees at Hud believe bringing anti-discrimination cases is “not a priority”, said the whistleblowers, who work in Hud’s Office of Fair Housing (OFH). Managers also informed the group that OFH, which brings cases against parties accused of discriminating against tenants and homebuyers, must be downsized because it had become an “optics problem”.
“There’s really just a complete stymying of fair housing, and that’s, I think, what inspired us to take this risk,” Palmer Heenan, who has been informed he will be reassigned out of the office early next month, told the Guardian.
The allegations, which were first reported by the New York Times, are the latest sign of how the Trump administration is planning to transform the enforcement of civil rights laws in the US, many of which stem from the struggle against Jim Crow and other racist practices in the 1960s. At the...
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