Trump Judges and Justice Department Reject School Racial Preferences

“For every person you ‘help’ due to race, you necessarily hurt another person due to race,” Trump-appointed Judge James Ho recently explained in a Louisiana case, as the president’s Justice Department also fights Harvard’s discrimination in Massachusetts against Asian Americans.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decided an appeal on Oct. 12 affirming that a charter school was bound by a consent decree that it voluntarily adopted as a condition to operate in Concordia Parish in Louisiana. In 1971, a federal court held that the public school district in that parish (which is Louisiana’s version of a county) engaged in unconstitutional racial discrimination, and Delta Charter Group assented to abide by the desegregation consent decree that constrains the public schools there.

Major issues in the current case were remanded back to the federal trial court for further proceedings and legal analysis, but during this first round of appeals, the New Orleans-based appeals court held that if a private school agrees to be bound by a consent decree that controls the public-school district with jurisdiction in that area, then courts should give effect to that decree.

More