DOJ Tracker: December Update

Welcome back to our Substack series to help you stay informed and engaged in protecting the Justice Department. Each month, we pull highlights from Justice Connection’s DOJ Tracker to offer a more digestible way to keep up with the latest attacks.

Here’s what happened in December.

DOJ continues to target people of color, LGBTQ+ community

In December, DOJ ended certain LGBTQ+ protections in detention centers, telling inspectors to stop evaluating safety standards for transgender, intersex, and gender-nonconforming inmates. This order is part of an effort to revise the department’s Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) regulations to align with President Trump’s day one executive order denying transgender recognition.

Transgender individuals already face high rates of violence, especially in detention facilities. A 2022 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that trans people experience violence at 2.5 times the rate of cisgender people. Another study found that 37% of transgender inmates have reported being sexually assaulted in prison, compared to 3% of all other demographics. The new rules apply to federally certified inspectors who audit facilities including federal and state prisons, jails, juvenile detention centers, and immigration detention centers.

DOJ has also ended a longstanding rule requiring federal funding recipients to ensure policies do not disproportionately harm people based on race, color, or national origin. The Department eliminated disparate impact liability from its enforcement regulations for Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which has been traditionally interpreted as banning both intentional discrimination and facially-neutral policies that cause disproportionate and unjustified disparities based on race, color, or national origin.

The disparate impact rule, first implemented in 1973, had a significant role in advancing racial equity over the last 50 years. Local governments and organizations that received funding from the federal government could not utilize policies that disproportionately harmed people of color if they did not serve legitimate, nondiscriminatory justifications. The rule allowed individuals to fight redlining, discriminatory policing practices, and pollution in their neighborhoods without having to prove discriminatory intent. As former Civil Rights Division leaders explained in the Washington Post, “disparate-impact standards promote fairness by helping uncover discrimination that is otherwise difficult to detect and by removing unjustified barriers that perpetuate the lingering effects of past discrimination.”

Now, DOJ says it will only pursue intentional discrimination cases under Title VI. It has already withdrawn from agreements to monitor illegal dumping in largely Black and Latino neighborhoods in Houston, and address dangerous wastewater issues affecting a mostly Black region of rural Alabama.

Write a letter, get a pardon

In a stark contradiction to his stated fight against drug trafficking, President Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras who was convicted of flooding the United States with 400 tons of cocaine, and sentenced to 45 years in prison. The New York Times reported that Hernández wrote Trump a letter casting his conviction as a vendetta contrived by the Biden administration, drawing parallels to Trump’s view of his own criminal investigations. “They said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them,” Trump told reporters. Notably, the investigation started before Trump was elected in 2016 and continued through his first term.

Similarly, FIFA officials played to Trump’s vanity in early December by presenting him with the organization’s first ever “peace prize.” Days later, the Justice Department dropped charges in a bribery case that was part of the long-running FIFA corruption scandal. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York had reportedly been pressured by Solicitor General John Sauer — a former personal attorney to Trump — to abandon efforts to defend the convictions that had been appealed to the Second Circuit. Some worry that ending the case could overturn dozens of convictions in the wide-ranging corruption case, not to mention set an example that DOJ’s attention can be averted for the right price.

Here are a few other things you might’ve missed:

• DOJ sued Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands to loosen local gun restrictions, the first actions out of the newly created Second Amendment Rights Section in the Civil Rights Division. This follows a continuing trend of disinvesting in firearms enforcement and prioritizing gun-rights litigation. DOJ has cut millions of dollars in gun violence prevention grants, proposed to eliminate two-thirds of inspectors monitoring federally licensed gun dealers, and published a rule restoring gun rights to individuals convicted of serious crimes. It also previously sued the Los Angeles sheriff’s department for not approving gun permits quickly enough.

• According to a Bloomberg report, military lawyers detailed to immigration courts are issuing deportation orders 78% of the time, compared to approximately 63% issued by all other immigration judges. DOJ fired one army lawyer serving as a temporary immigration judge after he granted asylum at a high rate, inconsistent with the administration’s deportation goals.

• DOJ began releasing Jeffrey Epstein records on Dec. 19, the date by which DOJ was statutorily required to disclose all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in its possession. The department also allegedly unearthed 5.2 million more pages of files and is drawing in about 400 lawyers from the National Security Division, Criminal Division, and U.S. attorneys’ offices in New York and Florida to review them. The slow pace of release has frustrated lawmakers on Capitol Hill and the public.