Updated March 27, 2025 at 05:01 AM ET
Under President Trump, the Justice Department is beginning to step away from legal actions that had begun during the Biden administration to combat racial discrimination in elections.
This month, attorneys for the U.S. government dropped two lawsuits over the rights of voters of color in Southern states. Weeks earlier, the Justice Department withdrew a request to take part in Monday's Supreme Court oral arguments for a Louisiana congressional redistricting case that some legal experts fear could further weaken the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In one of the dropped lawsuits, in Texas, a DOJ attorney told a panel of judges, shortly before the start of a courtroom trial, that the federal government wanted to dismiss all of its claims against the state's maps of congressional and state legislative voting districts. The federal government had previously claimed those maps dilute the voting strength of Black and Latino voters.
And in Georgia, the department said Monday that the U.S. government is ending a lawsuit it brought just over two months earlier — days before Trump's second inauguration — against Houston County. DOJ attorneys had argued the central Georgia county's system of electing commissioners as at-large representatives of one voting district weakens the collective power of Black voters.
The scaling back of enforcement of legal protections for racial minority groups was expected by many voting rights advocates in the transition from the Biden administration to the second term of Trump, who has pushed for more restrictions to voting access that studies show would likely disproportionately affect voters of color.
And while private individuals and groups are continuing to pursue these challenges in court, some legal experts see this DOJ retrenchment coming at an especially vulnerable moment for Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That allows people to sue in order to enforce bans on any standard, practice or procedure that "results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color." That section is a key remaining part of a law that has been undercut over the past decade by rulings from the Supreme Court's conservative majority.
The Justice Department's legal reasoning for backing out of these voting rights cases is not clear
"What we are seeing now is the Department of Justice saying that they're not in the business of enforcing these voting rights statutes and laws," says Gilda Daniels, who served as a deputy chief in the Justice Department's voting section during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
While legal views often change with a new administration, Daniels says in her experience, no matter who's the president, the DOJ seriously deliberates before moving forward with any case and "takes a large amount of time to ensure that this is a case that needs to be brought and a case where the department will be successful."
"In the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Voting Section, you don't just wake up one day and say, 'I'm going to bring a Section 2 Voting Rights Act case,'" explains Daniels, now a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. "By the time you get to filing a case, you're pretty sure that there has been a violation of one of these voting rights statutes or the Constitution."
Still, four days after Trump's swearing-in this January, the Justice Department told the Supreme Court that the federal government's opinion for the Louisiana congressional redistricting case had changed. The U.S. government, acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in a court filing, no longer takes the position that to get in line with Section 2, the state of Louisiana needed to draw another congressional district where Black voters have an opportunity to elect their preferred candidate.
The legal reasoning upon which the Justice Department is basing its recent about-face in the cases against Louisiana, Texas and Georgia's Houston County is not clear. The department's court filings have not provided details, and its public affairs office did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.
The main way of enforcing the Voting Rights Act's Section 2 is being challenged in court
For now, DOJ attorneys are still maintaining their positions in other voting rights cases. Two are in Georgia.
Last month, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wrote to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi with a public request for the DOJ to drop its lawsuit against a 2021 overhaul of Georgia's election laws, which Justice Department attorneys have argued was passed to restrict Black voters' ballot access in violation of Section 2. Raffensperger's office has not yet received a response, according to spokesperson Mike Hassinger.
Three days after the start of the second Trump administration, Noah Bokat-Lindell, a career DOJ attorney, appeared before a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for a separate case over Georgia's congressional and state legislative redistricting plans.
During oral arguments, Bokat-Lindell defended the constitutionality of Section 2 — a position that GOP officials in states including Georgia and Louisiana have been opposing in multiple lawsuits — as well as the right of private individuals and groups to sue to enforce the law's protections against racial discrimination in elections.
For decades, private challengers, who do not represent the U.S. government, have brought most of the lawsuits for enforcing Section 2.
But after Justice Neil Gorsuch released a one-paragraph opinion on the topic in 2021, Republican state officials have pushed a novel legal argument — that the Voting Rights Act does not allow private individuals and groups to bring Section 2 lawsuits. Voting rights advocates fear it's a potential path for undermining Section 2, which they say is crucial after a 2013 Supreme Court ruling effectively dismantled requirements for certain states and counties with a history of racial discrimination to get "preclearance" approval from the Justice Department or a federal court before changing their election rules.
"If you actually make it harder to demonstrate that a Section 2 violation exists and add an administration that is reluctant and/or unwilling to bring Section 2 cases, it could lead to dormancy [of the law] that I don't think we want to see as a democracy," Daniels, the former DOJ official, warns.
For now, civil rights leaders say their groups are trying to do their part to uphold the Voting Rights Act by helping to bring lawsuits to enforce Section 2.
"What we do is necessary. But it's insufficient," Damon Hewitt, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, says. "We need Congress to do its part — to give us the tools to advocate, to litigate and, frankly, to educate people on what our rights are, what our rights should be."
One of those tools, Hewitt says, would be restoring the Voting Rights Act's formula for determining exactly which state and local governments would have to submit proposed voting rule changes for preclearance.
Days before this month's 60th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march that galvanized the passing of the 1965 law, Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama led House Democrats in reintroducing a bill with an updated preclearance formula and language specifying that to enforce Section 2, "an aggrieved person" or the head of the Justice Department may file a federal lawsuit.
The bill, however, is unlikely to pass in this Republican-controlled Congress.
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
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