Trump Administration Joins Legal Push to Halt Evanston Reparations

The Justice Department has joined a federal lawsuit seeking to block Evanston, Illinois, from distributing $25,000 housing grants to Black residents. A judge approved the department's intervention this month in a case first filed by Judicial Watch. The government argues the city’s program distributes funds based on race without identifying specific harm, which it claims violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and the Fair Housing Act.

Evanston’s reparations committee, chaired by former city councilwoman Robin Rue Simmons, now known as N'nanba, created the program as the first municipal reparations effort in the United States. Simmons has spent years designing the initiative and is currently working to replicate the model in more than 100 other communities. She stated that despite administrative barriers, she and other advocates continue to view federal redress as their collective goal.

The legal challenge is part of a wider federal campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. In September, President Donald Trump addressed supporters by saying, "They want to steal your money for reparations," and added that the idea "is going nowhere." William Darity, who co-wrote a book on reparations, noted that no president has supported comprehensive Black reparations. He characterized the current administration's stance as hostile toward the concept.

The administration has taken similar actions in other jurisdictions. Last year, the Justice Department sent a warning letter to leaders in Asheville and Buncombe County, North Carolina, who were considering their own reparations programs. Kiersten Pels, a Justice Department spokeswoman, asserted that race-based government benefit programs are unconstitutional and frequently violate federal civil rights law. This legal posture follows the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which forced an estimated 12.5 million Africans onto ships bound for the Americas, with about 1.8 million dying during the journey.

Higher education institutions are also adjusting their approaches under federal pressure. Harvard University fired the team led by Richard Cellini, which had identified nearly 500 living descendants of people enslaved by its past leaders. The team was dismissed days after Trump issued his January 2025 anti-DEI order. Kirt von Daacke, a historian at the University of Virginia, reported that he sees no new scholarship programs in higher education since the president returned to office. While research by an outside firm continues at Harvard, the university has not provided redress to descendants.

Some programs continue to operate despite the federal pushback. Juan Woolfolk, a 36-year-old descendant of enslaved people, is using a $10,000 scholarship from Georgetown University to study museum studies at Southern University at New Orleans. Georgetown continues to offer admission consideration to such descendants. Virginia Theological Seminary makes annual cash payments to descendants of people who labored on its campus, funded by an endowment that has grown from $1.7 million to $2.8 million since 2019.

In Evanston, recipient Joe Martin, a 46-year-old Delta flight attendant, said the program represents a correction for a past where "40 acres and a mule didn't go down the way it was supposed to." He observed that when a legitimate program is created, "the government's like, naw." The U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution in March calling the trafficking of enslaved Africans "the gravest crime against humanity," a measure supported by more than 120 countries.

The United States voted against the U.N. resolution, joining Argentina and Israel in opposition. Fifty-two nations, including England and 27 European Union members, abstained from the vote. The legal fight in Evanston now tests whether local governments can maintain race-based financial aid programs while facing federal intervention under the current administration.