This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.
After a campus police officer grabbed student Ja’Liyah Celestine by the hair and kneed her in the face, she filed a federal civil rights complaint that alleged persistent racial discrimination against Black teens at her Texas high school.
But the complaint, brought by the 18-year-old in late October with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, may never get investigated.
That’s because it’s one of thousands of federal civil rights complaints and investigations against school districts nationally — particularly those alleging sexual misconduct or racism — that advocates say have been left to languish by the Trump administration with little hope for resolution. As the president and Secretary Linda McMahon seek to dismantle the Education Department — with its civil rights office among the hardest hit by layoffs — attorneys say students like Celestine have lost one of their few avenues for relief.
“When we filed the complaint on Oct. 29, we knew the election was a few days out and we knew this could very well be the outcome,” said Andrew Hairston, the director of the Education Justice Project at the nonprofit Texas Appleseed, who is representing Celestine in her complaint against the Beaumont Independent School District and its police department. “It’s very difficult for Black children, in particular, who face the harms of school police, to seek any vindication of their rights.”
Since President Donald Trump took office in January, civil rights attorneys at the Education Department have faced a whirlwind of directives and layoffs, throwing into uncertainty more than 12,000 civil rights investigations that stemmed from complaints by students, parents and their advocates. The Education Department and the Beaumont school district didn’t respond to requests for comment.
After investigations nationwide were paused following Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, the Education Department’s staff was cut roughly in half through layoffs of more than 1,300 employees, buyouts and early retirements. When the department announced mass firings earlier this month, at least 243 civil rights office staffers were cut. Meanwhile, seven of the 12 Office for Civil Rights regional offices were shuttered, including those in Philadelphia and Dallas, Texas, where Celestine’s complaint was filed.
It’s a situation that civil rights advocates say has left the Education Department unequipped to carry out its functions mandated by Congress. In a lawsuit filed March 14, advocates and families accused the Trump administration of eviscerating students’ access to federal civil rights remedies, with particular harm to students of color, female students and LGBTQ+ youth. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has prioritized cases tied to antisemitism complaints and has cracked down on schools that afford rights and protections to transgender students.
The lawsuit alleges the changes undermine the civil rights office’s ability to process and investigate complaints and asked a judge to order that its staffing be restored to levels that allow complaints from the public to be investigated “promptly and equitably.” Staffing changes were “arbitrary and capricious” the lawsuit charges, because Trump administration officials “did not articulate a reasoned basis for their decision to sabotage” the Office for Civil Rights.
“The fact that the federal government is kind of both eliminating these offices and then weaponizing what’s left of them to advance a very narrow definition of discrimination is not just troubling and sad, it’s also fundamentally antithetical to what democratic governance and law enforcement should look like,” said Johnathan Smith, the chief of staff and general counsel at the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law.
Smith represents the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Education Department and McMahon. They include Nikki Carter, a Black mother of three, who alleges she was barred from her children’s Alabama schools in retaliation for her work as an advocate for children with disabilities. A second parent, identified only as A.W., charges they had to remove their child from school for safety reasons after the student was sexually assaulted and harassed by a classmate and the school did not adequately respond. Both parents are members of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a nonprofit focused on the civil rights of children with disabilities.
Carter’s complaint was filed in September 2022 and A.W.’s in October 2023.
‘Communicating into a black hole’
It was spring 2024 when Celestine got into a fight and campus police in Beaumont were called to the scene.
Though the civil rights complaint submitted to the Education Department by the nonprofit Texas Appleseed doesn’t seek to absolve Celestine for her role in the fight, it takes aim at what happened next: A police use-of-force incident captured on video.
“Responding after the fight occurred” when the teenager was sitting passively on the floor, the complaint states, the officer with the school district police department pepper-sprayed Celestine, grabbed her by the hair and kneed her in the face.
“Such excessive force caused great harm” and was just the first form of punishment Celestine received for the fight, the complaint alleges. She was also suspended from school, placed in an alternative education program and required to complete community service — ”consequences that exceeded the nature of the incident in question,” it argues.
“This complaint does not ignore the significance of an offense such as in-school fighting,” Texas Appleseed’s Hairston wrote to federal investigators. But the altercation that Celestine was involved in “did not warrant the abuse she was subjected to.”
The issue at Beaumont is bigger than Celestine and a campus fight, Texas Appleseed contends. It “represents a salient example of how the school-to-prison pipeline operates,” according to the complaint, and highlights how Black students at the district and nationally are disproportionately subjected to law enforcement referrals in schools.
The 12,000 civil rights investigations that were pending as of Jan. 14 ahead of Trump’s inauguration were listed in an online database that hasn’t been updated since. Federal civil rights investigations routinely take years to resolve and the oldest pending complaint at the time, alleging sex-based discrimination in athletics against an Oklahoma school district was opened in 2007.
After Trump’s swearing-in, the Education Department paused all investigations in its civil rights office. In February, the agency ended the pause on investigations focused solely on disability-based discrimination, and then lifted the hold on sex- and race-based complaints on March 6 — just a week before the 243 OCR staffers were fired. At least 178 attorneys in the civil rights division and dozens of equal opportunity specialists were eliminated.
The Dallas regional office was among those shut down altogether, possibly relegating Celestine’s case and thousands more to oblivion. Smith with the National Center for Youth Law said he’s heard from fired Education Department employees who’ve lost access to their email accounts and all ability to communicate with families and attorneys about pending complaints.
“Unless someone is actually going to go into their email accounts and pull up those emails, those communications are lost,” Smith said. As a result, parents and school officials who are communicating with Education Department officials about pending cases are “literally communicating into a black hole because there’s no way for that information to go anywhere.”
Even if pending cases are transferred to other regional offices, Smith said, they should be considered dead on arrival.
“I just don’t see how anyone can believe that there’s going to be any real process or consideration of those complaints at this point,” Smith said.
‘Reinterpreting what is racial discrimination’
While certain cases appear to be jettisoned, fired Education Department staffers who spoke to The 74 and others allege the department’s civil rights division has been weaponized to pursue politically motivated investigations.
Among them is an investigation into the Denver school district for opening a gender-neutral bathroom at one of its high schools. Last week, the Office for Civil Rights found the state of Maine violated Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination, for allowing transgender student athletes to participate on girls’ sports teams.
As the Trump administration targets diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at schools and colleges, the Education Department opened an investigation against the Ithaca, New York, school district, charging a Students of Color United Summit designed to “provide a safe space” and “uplift students of color” was discriminatory against white students.
Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator at the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, accused the Trump administration of launching “directed investigations” to advance political agendas “based on something they read in the newspaper” rather than from complaints filed by students attending those schools.
“This department is clearly fixated on race and reinterpreting what is racial discrimination,” Jordan said. Ideological beliefs around racial discrimination and transgender students’ rights, he said “seem to have spilled over into how they see civil rights enforcement.”
Jordan said the ACLU represents students in about 20 pending federal civil rights complaints nationally, yet “nobody is hearing anything” from the civil rights office about the status of those investigations. Among the complaints is an allegation by seven students that Pennsylvania’s Central Bucks School District engaged in a widespread culture of discrimination against LGBTQ+ students, particularly those who are transgender and nonbinary.
“Given their diatribes about gender ideology and stuff, I suspect that they’re not going to be terribly sympathetic,” Jordan said. “But we ultimately don’t know, and ultimately they’re supposed to follow the law and enforce the law.”
Meanwhile, at least one civil rights complainant bowed out before the Trump administration could even weigh in, said Katie McKay, an attorney at the Brooklyn law firm C.A. Goldberg where she works on cases involving sexual discrimination, harassment and assault at K-12 schools and colleges. McKay said a college student whose sexual assault case “had been open since Obama was in office,” decided to voluntarily close the complaint after Trump was elected for a second term “because of concerns that this administration would mishandle the case.”
“It’s frustrating and sad to see that this person has been sitting with this unresolved issue for like a decade and then it’s kind of this non-resolution,” McKay said. The decision to terminate the complaint was made in part on the long history of sexual assault allegations against the president himself. In 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse against the writer E. Jean Carroll in 1996.
“There’s this fear that those values were going to be applied to the case,” McKay said. “Closing out the case at least created a sense of closure on their own terms rather than letting this administration speak for them.”
