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Halting Trump's Anti-DEI Orders, Federal Judge Says They Promote 'Textbook' Discrimination
"We are grateful for the court's decision to pause these harmful executive orders while it takes a careful look at how the orders blatantly violate our Constitution," said one advocate.
Feb 22, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump's efforts to rid the federal government and corporations of programs that promote inclusive hiring practices hit a roadblock Friday evening when a federal judge in Maryland granted a preliminary injunction blocking portions of Trump's executive orders, saying they would "likely" be found to violate the First Amendment.
The ruling pertained to two executive orders the president issued in the first days of his second term in the White House, which directed federal agencies to end all "equity-related" contracts and required federal contractors to certify that they don't promote "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI)—frameworks used by companies, schools, and other organizations to ensure historically marginalized groups have opportunities and see their histories included in school curricula.
The latter provision, argued the coalition that sued over the orders in Maryland, suppresses the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
The term DEI has been invoked repeatedly by right-wing politicians who have blamed pro-diversity hiring practices for the deadly plane crash near Washington, D.C. late last month and the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles last month, and Trump's billionaire backer and "special government employee" Elon Musk has called DEI "immoral" and "just another word for racism."
Trump's orders targeting DEI have already led to purges of federal workers while corporations including Google, Deloitte, and Target have announced an end to DEI programs and universities have faced the possibility of federal investigations into suspected DEI practices—which are designed to ensure the inclusion of military veterans, first-generation college students, women, people with disabilities, and people of color, among other groups.
U.S. District Judge Adam B. Abelson in the District of Maryland on Friday said Trump's orders promote "textbook viewpoint-based discrimination."
"The government's threat of enforcement is not just targeted towards enforcement of federal law," said the judge, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden. "Rather, the provision expressly targets, and threatens, the expression of views supportive of equity, diversity, and inclusion."
The preliminary ruling was handed down in a case filed by advocacy group Democracy Forward on behalf of the American Association of University Professors, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE), Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, and the mayor and city council of Baltimore earlier this month.
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement that the U.S. Constitution "protects all Americans—whether you are a university professor or a restaurant worker—from unlawful intrusion on speech, ideas, and expression and entitles all Americans to fair process. The Trump administration's anti-equity directives violate these core protections."
"We are grateful for the court's decision to pause these harmful executive orders while it takes a careful look at how the orders blatantly violate our Constitution," said Perryman. "As our complaint states, in the United States, there is no King."
Paulette Granberry Russell, president and CEO of NADOHE, called the ruling "a crucial victory for higher education and academic freedom and also vindicates the legitimacy of the efforts by individuals, institutions, and organizations nationwide to foster inclusion in ways that have been uncontroversially legal for decades."
"This ruling underscores that ensuring equity, diversity, and inclusion are the very goals of federal anti-discrimination law, not a violation of the law," said Russell. "NADOHE applauds the court for recognizing the irreparable harm of the Trump administration's executive orders in abridging and chilling unquestionably protected speech and in threatening enforcement action based on unconstitutionally vague and undefined standards."
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, a Democrat, said Trump's orders "are not only unconstitutional but also clearly oppose our country's core values."
"Our country prides itself on being a melting pot where everyone has equal opportunity to achieve and live the American Dream," said Scott.
The mayor added that as the federal court continues to examine the case, the plaintiffs will fight Trump's pro-discrimination efforts "with every legal tool available, as demonstrated by our ongoing lawsuit."
"This executive order endangers critical federal funding for Baltimore and countless other communities, putting jobs and livelihoods at risk. Moreover, it seeks to establish a legal framework to attack anyone or any organization that dares to celebrate our diversity," Scott continued. "Such actions are fundamentally un-American. We are a nation built on diversity, unity, and the belief that everyone deserves a fair chance."
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After Weekend Walkouts, Hotel Worker Strikes Grow on Labor Day
"We refuse to accept wages that can't support our families. It's insulting. And it ends now."
Sep 02, 2024
After approximately 10,000 hotel workers across the United States walked off the job over the weekend ahead of Labor Day, the strikes not only continued but grew on Monday, with employees of the Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor taking to the streets.
In Maryland's biggest city, workers with UNITE HERE Local 7 carried signs that said, "Respect our work," "One job should be enough," and "Make them pay."
Sharing a video of the picket line on social media, the union said: "We refuse to accept wages that can't support our families. It's insulting. And it ends now."
The Baltimore workers joined staff from two dozen other hotels in Boston, Greenwich, Honolulu, Kauai, San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose, and Seattle who started their strikes on Sunday and plan to stay on the picket line through Tuesday.
"10,000 hotel workers across the U.S. are on strike because the hotel industry has gotten off track," UNITE HERE international president Gwen Mills said in a statement. "During Covid, everyone suffered, but now the hotel industry is making record profits while workers and guests are left behind. Too many hotels still haven't restored standard services that guests deserve, like automatic daily housekeeping and room service."
"Workers aren't making enough to support their families," she emphasized. "Many can no longer afford to live in the cities that they welcome guests to, and painful workloads are breaking their bodies. We won't accept a 'new normal' where hotel companies profit by cutting their offerings to guests and abandoning their commitments to workers."
Striking workers echoed the messages from Mills and their signs. Christian Carbajal, a market attendant who has worked for 15 years at the Hilton Bayfront in San Diego, said that "I'm on strike because I don't want hotels to become the next airline industry."
"I used to work in room service, but after Covid, they closed my department. Now I work in the grab-and-go market," Carbajal continued. "Guests complain to me that they can no longer get a steak delivered up to the room, and the tips aren't what they used to be. I'm making less than I used to, and now two families share my house because we can't afford the rent anymore. The hotels should respect our work and our guests."
Elena Duran, who has worked as a server at Marriott's Palace Hotel in San Francisco for 33 years, similarly said that "since Covid, they're expecting us to give five-star service with three-star staff."
"A couple weeks ago, we were at 98% occupancy, but they only put three servers when we used to be a team of four or five," Duran noted. "It's too much pressure on us to go faster and faster instead of calling in more people to work."
Mary Taboniar, who has been a housekeeper at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Honolulu for six years, said that "I have to work a second job because my job at the hotel is not enough to support my kids as a single mom."
"I'm living on the edge where I'm not sure if I'll be able to pay our rent and groceries or provide my family with healthcare," Taboniar added. "It's so stressful. One job should be enough."
Daniela Campusano, who has been at Hilton's Hampton Inn & Homewood Suites in Boston's Seaport District for a dozen years, also said she is not making enough as a housekeeper.
"I'm on strike because I need higher wages. I currently have two jobs, and I work about 65 hours a week," Campusano said. "Everything is so expensive now—all my monthly bills have increased, and I need to earn more money so I can help my daughter pay for her university studies. One job should be enough."
Fellow housekeeper Rebeca Laroque, who has been at the Hyatt Regency Greenwich for the past 12 years, explained that "I'm on strike because I need more wages, I need the health insurance, and I need less rooms."
"I work so hard and come home exhausted at the end of the day, but I still don't make enough money to pay my bills," Laroque said. "Going on strike is a huge sacrifice, but it's something I have to do because I need a better life for me and my two kids."
Other groups and lawmakers expressed solidarity with the striking hotel workers, including the AFL-CIO, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, the National Employment Law Project, the United Auto Workers, and U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).
Along with corporate price gouging that is driving up prices, hotel workers have been impacted by practices including stock buybacks. An Institute for Policy Studies analysis released last week shows that Hilton and Marriott are among the 20 largest low-wage employers who have poured millions of dollars into share repurchases since 2019.
Meanwhile, Americans' support for organized labor has hit a seven-decade high, according to Gallup recent polling. Citing that survey, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Monday that "the working people of our country are increasingly aware of the unprecedented level of corporate greed and power we are now experiencing, and the outrageous level of income and wealth inequality that exists."
"They understand that never before in American history have so few had so much, while so many continue to struggle," he added. "And they are fighting back."
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Baltimore Drive-By: The Bridge, the City, and Infrastructural Racism
As we remember those who lost their lives in the bridge disaster, let's not forget the people who are killed by structural violence every day in Baltimore.
Mar 31, 2024
Baltimore's mayor was the target of racist social media attacks after he spoke to reporters about the collapse of the Key Bridge. That's disgusting, but it's hardly surprising. Racism is carved into the city's very infrastructure. It has reshaped its neighborhoods, highways, and mass transit.
The destruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge was tragic. But the bridge's primary purpose wasn't to serve Baltimore; it was to get around it. It certainly wasn't built for Baltimore's low-income residents, many of whom don't even have cars. What good is a bridge to people who don't own an automobile?
The numbers are startling on that score. Nationally, only 8.3 percent of American households don't have a car. But in Baltimore's Sandtown neighborhood, that figure is 58.4 percent. It's 48.9 percent in Southwest Baltimore and 47.9 percent in Upton/Druid Heights.
These neighborhoods are under siege. In Upton/Druid Heights, for example, 58 percent of children live in poverty. That's nearly six times higher than the overall state of Maryland.
People are dying in Baltimore — not from the drive-by shootings you see in the news from time to time, which have a relatively low body count. The large-scale dying comes from the city's structural drive-by, reflected in the bridges, tunnels, and highways that let interstate travelers bypass Baltimore as if it wasn't even there.
That's not to say infrastructure isn't a good investment. The structural drive-by is seen in the investments that don't happen.
Although the Key Bridge carried local traffic, its essential function was to move passengers and cargo along the interstate highway system. But another infrastructure project, which never got the green light, would have helped Baltimore's lower-income neighborhoods more.
The Red Line, a proposed addition to the city's rail system, would have linked lower-income, majority Black neighborhoods to jobs in other parts of the city –– in Camden Yards, the Inner Harbor, and the universities, medical centers, and corporations on the east side of town. But the Red Line was never built. After a string of delays, Republican Governor Larry Hogan — now, puzzlingly, the leading candidate for senator in this predominantly Democratic state — killed the project for good.
Journalist Alon Levy put it succinctly in his article on the decision, headlined "How You Can Tell Larry Hogan's Decision to Kill the Red Line Was Racially Discriminatory." Here's how: Hogan killed Baltimore's Red Line but promoted the Purple Line in richer, whiter Montgomery County. That led to a Title VI civil rights lawsuit and a federal investigation at the close of the Obama administration. But the investigation was killed after Trump took office, and the lawsuit lost momentum.
Transportation infrastructure has a long segregationist history, in Baltimore and across the country. The mid-twentieth century highway construction boom fueled white flight from urban centers. But white flight began even earlier in Baltimore, as journalist Alec MacGillis explains, with the construction of a pioneering streetcar system in the early twentieth century. That gave rise to white "streetcar suburbs" like Catonsville and Oakenshawe.
White flight made it easier to systematically neglect a city's remaining, Black neighborhoods. So did the real-estate practice of "blockbusting," which lowered the value of working-class white homes by preying on racist fears over integration. As University of Maryland Prof. W. Edward Orser documents, "blockbusting" in Baltimore allowed real estate companies to buy White homes at a loss and then sell them to Black families at inflated prices. Working-class Whites were robbed of an asset, Black families were robbed through overcharging, and segregation got worse.
Not that housing discrimination was anything new in Baltimore. It pioneered residential segregation in 1910, when the City Council passed a law designating city blocks as White or Black. (It was later struck down by the Supreme Court.)
People forget that Maryland is below the Mason-Dixon line and slavery was legal there until 1864. Advertisements for the "sale" of enslaved people were once common in the Baltimore Sun.
Today, as in the past, structural violence kills. Life expectancy in Upton/Druid Heights is 62.9 years, but it's 83.1 years in Roland Park, the city's richest neighborhood – where most households have more than one car. That's a twenty-year gap in life expectancy.
The Maryland Transportation Authority (MTA), which operated the Key Bridge, often neglects the needs of lower-income people. An electronic EZ-Pass is required to pay tolls, for example, and they are difficult to obtain without a bank account. (The Federal Reserve reports that 13 percent of Black households are unbanked.)
The MTA's floundering "traffic relief plan," crafted under Hogan, would have increased traffic in parts of the DC area and raised tolls for many drivers through a "public-private investment" that would have siphoned off highway revenue for private profit and imposed "dynamic pricing" –surge pricing that could change as often as every five minutes, driving tolls out of the reach of many area residents. It would also have given a private company control over more than 100 miles of the DC area's high-speed lanes.
Fortunately, Hogan's privatization scheme floundered after pushback from local officials and his Democratic successor. So has his other "public-private partnership," the Purple Line. But the intent was clear — and it was not to serve the Black, Brown, and White lower-income people of Maryland.
Transportation was even used against high school students during the 2015 protests over the police killing of Freddie Gray. As MacGillis writes,
"Just after Freddie Gray's memorial service had concluded, and headed for Mondawmin Mall, the transit hub for some 5,000 of them, they found several hundred police waiting ... They also found that the bus lines through the hub were suspended, as was service at the Mondawmin subway station ..."
"It was almost as if authorities were trying to engineer the confrontation that ensued between the growing mass of stranded youths and the outnumbered cops," MacGillis adds.
But these are merely the latest battles in a war that has lasted for four hundred years. The Susquehannock people were hunting in what is now Baltimore when Europeans declared the Province of Maryland in 1634. They soon became refugees in their own native land. The scattered bands that survived eventually merged into other tribes – which were also driven from the region.
Call it the first drive-by.
As we remember those who lost their lives in the bridge disaster, let's not forget the people who are killed by structural violence every day in Baltimore.
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