The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights resolved only three racial harassment investigations in the 18 months since President Trump's second term began in January 2025—a sharp drop from the 72 investigations completed in 2024 under the prior administration. No sexual harassment or violence cases have seen settlements under the current administration, according to a WorkLife Law report.
Thousands of civil rights investigations were pending when Trump took office. Among them, more than three dozen cases already complete were awaiting final negotiations for improvement plans and potential remedies for students.
One stalled investigation involves Chesaning Union Schools in central Michigan. In 2024, a Black fifth-grade girl at Chesaning Middle School faced repeated racial slurs from classmates, including being called a "monkey" and the n-word. Students told her her skin was "burnt like a piece of chicken," according to the girl and her mother.
The harassment escalated after a February 2024 Black History Month lesson on slavery. A white boy reportedly asked the girl, "Hey slave, where are your tools so you can get back to working?"
Frustrated by the school's response, the girl's mother filed a complaint with the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, detailing the harassment and saying her daughter suffered emotional scarring.
The Office for Civil Rights, established to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opened an investigation into Chesaning Union Schools in June 2024. By that fall, investigators had documented the harassment claims and flagged the district's failure to respond properly, according to an investigative document.
Federal officials entered negotiations with the district in early January 2025 to develop an improvement plan to settle the case. Those talks aimed to establish remedies such as new training, improved accountability systems and, in some instances, compensation for affected students.
The agreements never finalized. Trump's second term began, and the civil rights office departed from decades of federal practice by indefinitely freezing such investigations, according to eight current and former employees familiar with the situation.
Those employees, who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal, said the administration gutted the Office for Civil Rights and shifted its focus to investigations into transgender athletes and other conservative policy priorities.
That redirection left dozens of investigations—including Chesaning's—unresolved despite reaching their final stages, leaving students without the federal oversight and mandated changes designed to prevent future harassment.
Trump's team also directed the opening of investigations into more than a dozen universities, according to sources with direct knowledge, signaling a broader administrative shift in civil rights enforcement across education.
