Trump Officials Challenge Reparations Program in Chicago Suburb

The Justice Department on Tuesday joined a lawsuit challenging a city program offering reparations for civil rights violations to Black residents in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, arguing that the aid program amounted to racial discrimination.

The Justice Department filed a motion to join a lawsuit, filed by the conservative activist group Judicial Watch, representing descendants of people who had lived in Evanston but could not apply for the program because they were not Black. The suit argues that the racial requirement is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — a statute aimed at making formerly enslaved Black people equal citizens of the United States.

The filing by the Justice Department targets a relatively small program in Evanston, a city of 76,000 known for its liberal politics where roughly a quarter of the population is Black or interracial. The city has, so far, distributed $5 million in cash payments and housing grants to 212 applicants.

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Unlike some reparations proposals that aim to widely distribute aid to the descendants of people who were enslaved and brought from Africa, the program in Evanston is more narrowly targeted to residents who can show that they or their ancestors were victims of redlining and other discriminatory housing practices in the city that limited the neighborhoods where Black people could live.

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