When President Donald Trump laid off nearly 1,400 workers from the Department of Education last year, he knew that his actions would make it much harder for the department to carry out its core tasks to protect students. The layoffs were part of a larger strategy: Trump’s ultimate goal is to shut down the Department of Education for good, and he has since shifted many of the department’s primary functions to other cabinet departments, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Labor, and the Department of State.
Before Trump’s second administration, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) protected the rights of students from marginalized groups in schools receiving federal funding by enforcing anti-discrimination laws in areas such as admissions, athletics, and discipline. Those marginalized groups include students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, and students of color, including African American students.
The Department of Education and OCR often fell short of this mandate during the first Trump Administration. For example, the OCR shelved numerous civil rights complaints while dismissing or closing out many inherited complaints without any findings of wrongdoing. Under Trump 2.0, however, marginalized students have seen the protections they had under the Biden Administration eroded.
Already backlogged with civil rights and discrimination complaints, the department has been left unable to enforce civil rights laws with a smaller workforce. The laid-off staffers at OCR were handling thousands of cases. Now, the department is forcing state officials to take up the work. The clear message: “We no longer care to protect students from marginalized groups.”
The Trump Administration is also on the warpath against what it deems leftwing curriculum. It has mandated that school districts across the country disavow diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); discontinue grants because they promote DEI or “gender ideology extremism.” It also withheld nearly $7 billion from schools last summer, which threatened initiatives like the Twenty-first Century Community Learning Centers grant program, and went after schools that make accommodations for LGBTQ+ and transgender students and athletes.
Thus, the Trump Administration has turned OCR’s traditional role of enforcing civil rights on its head, turning it into a tool to undermine civil rights. For instance, Trump’s Department of Justice recently launched an investigation into three Michigan school districts—Detroit, Lansing, and Godfrey-Lee—to determine if they included any “sexual orientation and gender ideology” content in their classes without giving parents an opportunity to opt their children out. Trump’s Department of Education is also using threats of legal action and loss of funding to force the state of New York to allow a school district to use a Native American mascot and logo without the permission of a local Indigenous tribe.
The department has even decided to withhold $350 million in Congressionally approved funds from colleges and universities which serve students of color, on grounds that the institutions’ admissions quotas, which seem central to their very missions, are “discriminatory.” This money is being diverted elsewhere.
These and other similar actions have no doubt harmed students from marginalized groups.
In all, some 7.5 million students are in danger of losing key special education services because of cuts to the Education Department, ranging from speech therapy to individualized education programs. The cuts will likely lead to a loss of staff, elimination of grant programs, cuts to parent advocacy groups, and a lack of federal accountability to ensure students with disabilities are being educated properly. LGBTQ+ students are rebuffed by the department, which refuses to hear their complaints of discrimination in schools. A rollback to weaker rules has invited harassment while weakening protections against harassment claims, leaving students and their advocates defenseless.
Students of color, particularly African American students, are a specific target of the department’s ire, particularly those who are either disabled or members of the LGBTQ+ community, or both. For example, in September 2025, the department ended discretionary funding for several Minority-Serving Institution grants, including programs tied to supporting predominantly Black institutions, saying race- or ethnicity-based eligibility was unconstitutional. Federal cuts to minority-serving higher education institutions will likely lead to reduced enrollment of students of color in colleges and universities.
A Bloomberg analysis of data from twenty-seven elite universities found that, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision effectively ending affirmative action in college admissions, all but two reported a smaller share of Black freshmen in fall 2025 compared to fall 2023. A study by the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) found that anti-DEI policies make it harder for students of color to access higher education. As a result, these students fear sharing how their racial identities and experiences shaped their academic journeys.
Also, once on a college campus, these students—including LGBTQ+ students—often struggle with feeling they don’t belong and worry for their safety, as do their parents.
The potential blocking of federal funds would also cause irreparable harm to schools whose communities are predominantly Black and Latine, as well as low-income. Title I funding provides school districts with high percentages of children from low-income families with federal financial support to supplement their education. Funding cuts to the Department of Education have compromised key data collection, including data on school performance, discipline, and teacher demographics that track schools’ efforts to provide Black and Latine students with an equitable education. And staff and funding cuts have undermined initiatives designed to hire more Black teachers, offer Black history courses and other culturally affirming curricula, and train teachers on culturally responsive and affirming instructional practices.
Make no mistake: Trump and his administration only care for protecting the privilege of white people, whether it’s allowing Afrikaners only to immigrate to the United States from South Africa or focusing on reverse racism, saying that DEI policies have harmed white people in the workplace and otherwise. Tellingly, that care is withheld when white people begin protesting and resisting policies that harm people of color, such as mass deportations—and the protestors, like Renée Good and Alex Pretti, end up being murdered.
In truth, Trump and his administration have made the calculation that bringing out the racism from within white people—as well as people of color—would win Trump elections. It worked two out of three times.
They’ve told white people that Black people are trying to make them feel guilty about racism and enslavement. They’ve said Spanish-speaking Africans and African-descended folks from the Global South were taking their jobs, opportunities, and power. This lie was what got Trump elected.
The Trump Administration has played on what W.E.B. DuBois called the racial bribe that extends special (white) privileges to the white working class to drive a wedge between them and other labor groups, particularly Black labor. However, when white workers found out that Donald Trump was actually picking their pockets by impacting them with job loss and program cuts, they began protesting in events like the No Kings marches. Along main streets and highways, Trump voters protested Trump’s policy decision, and as people—specifically MAGA voters—become “woke” to Trump’s priorities, the Trump machine returns to the well that is stoking the racism that got Trump elected.
Sadly, the casualties of this strategy are school students, whether they be children of color, disabled, LGBTQ+, or an amalgam of any of these. Trump and his supporters don’t care about marginalized students—they care only for themselves, and how they can get richer and consolidate political and economic power.
If people are concerned about the children—and they should be—it’s not enough to vote the Trump Administration out of office. This nation must do what it’s never been willing to do to white supremacists: hold them accountable. Only after that can we begin rebuilding what’s been torn down and protect those who are most vulnerable.