Three Rogue Judges Block Trump Admin Efforts To Eradicate Discriminatory DEI From Schools
The attempted judicial coup continues apace as three federal district court judges issued directives to stop the Trump administration’s ability to halt federal funding for schools that participate in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) discrimination.
Thursday saw district judges in Maryland, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C., issue separate sweeping orders to stop some of the major education reforms President Donald Trump was elected to enact.
“Unelected judges, keen to disrupt the President’s efforts to remove color-consciousness from American education have forgotten that the judiciary is the only non-political branch of our tripartite system of government,” Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president and legal fellow at Defending Education, told The Federalist. “Judges that prohibit the Department of Education’s enforcement of its ‘Dear Colleague Letter’ and related civil rights compliance form forget that both are constitutional and a plain-text application of longstanding federal civil rights laws like Title VI.”
“That law specifically conceives that institutions which do not uphold race neutral policies can have their federal funding revoked,” she continued. “Judges are bound to interpret the laws as they read — not as judges wish they read.”
The cases, brought by far-left teachers unions, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and others, were decided by two Trump-appointed judges and one appointee of President Barack Obama. They also came just one day after Trump signed yet another executive order trying to rein in the DEI-caused destruction in schools.
New Hampshire District Judge Landya B. McCafferty, the Obama appointee, claimed that the Department of Education did not properly define DEI in a Feb. 14, 2025, “Dear Colleague Letter,” despite the fact that, as McCafferty herself acknowledges, the letter exhaustively described the insidious ideology.
The 2025 Letter begins by asserting that schools within this country have “embrace[d] … pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences,” as well as “other forms of racial discrimination,” which have “emanated throughout every facet of academia.” It goes on to state that schools have engaged in such discrimination by “toxically indoctrinat[ing] students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices … under the banner of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (‘DEI’), smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.” According to the 2025 Letter, DEI programs “discriminate in less direct, but equally insidious” ways by “frequently preferenc[ing] certain racial groups and teach[ing] students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not.” It asserts that “[s]uch programs stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes” and “deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school.”
But McCafferty’s decision shows that she simply does not like the policy goals of eradicating DEI, goals that millions of Americans voted for when casting a ballot for Trump.
Bizarrely, the judge said that, because the Biden administration’s Department of Education — the biggest purveyor of the ideology — thought DEI was fine, the Trump administration must somehow follow suit. McCafferty also suggested that the Biden administration’s loopholes to bypass the end of the affirmative action racial admissions system should have been accounted for in the 2025 Letter.
Perhaps confused about how elections work, McCafferty continued, “Again, the 2025 Letter does not acknowledge the Department’s change in position from believing that DEI initiatives lawfully foster a ‘supportive, welcoming environment,’ to believing that DEI programs illegally ‘deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school’ by ‘stigmatiz[ing] students … based on crude racial stereotypes.’”
McCafferty added that the loss of federal funding “would cripple the operations of many educational institutions.” But the threat of pulling federal funding is consistently used by the federal government to seek compliance and is not new.
Maryland District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher, a Trump appointee, made a procedural argument claiming that “the Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their Administrative Procedure Act (‘APA’) claim, have demonstrated that they will be irreparably harmed absent preliminary relief, and have shown the equities and public interest favor them.”
The judge essentially said that the implementation of the 2025 Letter was not done properly and therefore stopped its implementation nationwide.
While saying the court is not required to decide whether the policies are “good or bad, prudent or foolish, fair or unfair,” Gallagher said she is “constitutionally required to closely scrutinize whether the government went about creating and implementing them in the manner the law requires. The government did not.”
Gallagher has also ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate the return” of a Venezuelan man deported to El Salvador.
Using reasoning similar to that of McCafferty, D.C. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, another Trump appointee, said the Trump administration set “no clear ‘boundaries’” for what DEI means, adding that a directive from the Trump administration telling schools to prove their compliance in ending DEI could not reasonably be followed.
Threatening the loss of funding “without sufficiently defining the conduct that might trigger liability, violates the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on vagueness,” she wrote.
As my colleague Shawn Fleetwood pointed out, the responsibility to rein in the rogue lower court judges who are making sweeping, nationwide decisions lies at the feet of the U.S. Supreme Court — which has been completely derelict in fulfilling that responsibility.
Breccan F. Thies is a correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
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