On Wednesday evening, newly appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi distributed over a dozen memos to multiple divisions within the Department of Justice (DOJ), including one signaling that private-sector DEI initiatives may face potential criminal investigation under a recent executive order by President Donald Trump.
“President Trump issued Executive Order 14173 … making clear that policies relating to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (“DEI”) and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (“DEIA”) ‘violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws’ and ‘undermine our national unity,’” the memo states.
Trump’s Executive Order 14173 mandates the dismantling of DEI programs within the federal government and halts related hiring, mischaracterizing these initiatives as discriminatory. It also directs executive branch agencies to aggressively scrutinize private-sector DEI efforts through civil compliance investigations.
While legal experts emphasize that “[w]ithout congressional action, the DEI Executive Orders alone won’t dismantle existing federal antidiscrimination laws,” civil rights advocates warn that recent actions by the Trump administration show that it is weaponizing these laws against the very groups they were designed to protect.
“[T]he administration is not only undoing decades of federal anti-discrimination policy, spanning Democratic and Republican presidential administrations alike, but also marshalling federal enforcement agencies to bully both private and government entities into abandoning legal efforts to promote equity and remedy systemic discrimination,” ReNika Moore, director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, wrote in a commentary about the order.
For instance, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which was established under the 1964 Civil Rights Act to investigate discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sex, and other protected characteristics, has announced plans to scale back enforcement of policies protecting transgender people since Trump’s inauguration. It also recently instructed staff to stop processing LGBTQ-related discrimination complaints. Similarly, last month, Acting Labor Secretary Vincent Micone issued a directive instructing the Department of Labor to “immediately cease and desist” enforcing anti-discrimination and affirmative action requirements for government contractors, in compliance with Trump’s anti-DEI order.
Now, Bondi’s anti-DEI directive, issued in accordance with Trump’s executive order, instructs the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division — historically tasked with safeguarding the rights of marginalized groups — and the Office of Legal Policy to take action against private companies that prioritize workforce diversity through DEIA programs. The directive sets a March 1 deadline for these departments to submit a report with their “recommendations” on how to “encourage the private sector to end illegal discrimination and preferences, including policies relating to DEI and DEIA.”
The memo requests a list of business “sectors of concern within the Department of Justice” and seeks to identify the “most egregious and discriminatory DEI and DEIA practitioners in each sector.” It also calls for details on “litigation activities” and “other strategies” to act against private companies implementing DEIA programs.
Additionally, Bondi’s memo states that the DOJ will coordinate with the Department of Education to ensure that universities comply with the Trump administration’s new anti-DEIA mandate.
“It is clear as someone who studies Black critiques of white supremacy — framed by Republicans as DEI — that this Trump admin initiative could very easily result in criminal penalties for those researching & teaching [about] regimes of oppression & movements for liberation,” historian William Horne said on Bluesky. “A criminalization of critique.”
The directive further suggests that certain private companies could face criminal penalties for their DEIA initiatives. Bondi specifically instructs the Civil Rights Division and the Office of Legal Policy to outline “specific steps or measures to deter the use of DEI and DEIA programs or principles,” including “proposals for criminal investigations and for up to nine potential civil compliance investigations” targeting companies within the identified “sectors of concern.”
“They are seeking to criminalize integration efforts across public life. We must be clear eyed and direct about what’s happening here,” investigative journalist Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones said on Bluesky. “We have not witnessed this blatant of a comprehensive governmental attack on integration since the Civil Rights Movement.”
These aggressive measures have already drawn sharp criticism from legal experts, who argue that the Trump administration may be overstepping its constitutional boundaries. For example, Slate jurisprudence writers Jeremy Stahl and Mark Joseph Stern have said that Bondi’s memo may be “egregiously unconstitutional” and that “[t]he Trump administration is overplaying its hand on this issue and is racing toward a legal battle that it is likely to lose.”
In fact, the administration’s aggressive stance on DEI programs has already sparked legal challenges. Earlier this month, a coalition — including a restaurant group, the city of Baltimore, chief diversity officers, and professors — filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over his anti-DEI executive order, arguing that the president’s actions are unconstitutional. Specifically, the lawsuit claims that the order is “unconstitutionally vague” and fails to clearly define what constitutes an illegal DEI program, which enables enforcers to “engage in discriminatory enforcement.”
Alongside the anti-DEI directive, Bondi issued additional memos yesterday on other far right policy matters, including reinstating the death penalty, cracking down on sanctuary cities, and implementing a strict return-to-office mandate.
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
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