A few months ago, Jack Graham connected me with Trey Walk. We had both been thinking and writing, from different angles, about what was happening to federal civil rights enforcement. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch, and I’ve been tracking his work.
Last month, Human Rights Watch published Trey’s Remedies Abandoned, a major Human Rights Watch report examining what has happened across the federal institutions people have long relied upon for protection, opportunity and redress when their civil rights are violated. The report documents not simply a change in priorities, but the dismantling and repurposing of significant parts of the federal civil rights enforcement apparatus.
It is an achievement, and one I hope people will spend some time with, even if they don’t read all 112 pages.
Trey and I sat down for a Substack Live conversation about what he found, what surprised him and what this moment means. But we also went beyond the report. We talked about what happens when rights remain on the books but the institutions responsible for providing remedies retreat from that responsibility; what we may need to build next; and why documenting the history that brought these institutions into being matters at a moment when so much of that history is itself being contested.
It was a rich conversation, and I’m glad to be able to share it.
Works discussed
Trey Walk, Remedies Abandoned: US Civil Rights Enforcement Under the Trump Administration
Human Rights Watch’s investigation of the dismantling and redirection of federal civil rights enforcement. (Human Rights Watch)
Dax-Devlon Ross, “The Obama Administration Ordered Newark to Fix Its Police Force. Here’s What Has—and Hasn’t—Happened.”
My 2019 Washington Post Magazine reporting on Newark’s federal consent decree and what civil rights enforcement looked like during the first Trump administration—a period that, in retrospect, looks more like retreat and indifference than the affirmative dismantling Trey documents today. (The Washington Post)
The New York Times on Harmeet Dhillon and the Civil Rights Division
A recent look at the person leading the Division and the alternative conception of civil rights enforcement taking shape inside DOJ. (The New York Times)
Legal Defense Fund, “LDF Calls for Congressional and United Nations Investigations into Suspicious Deaths of Black People in the United States”
An important contemporary example of civil rights advocates looking beyond the executive branch—and even beyond the United States—for investigation and potential remedies. (Legal Defense Fund)
Civil Rights Congress, We Charge Genocide
The 1951 petition to the United Nations documenting racial violence against Black Americans and seeking an international remedy at a time when adequate federal civil rights enforcement did not yet exist. It became an unexpected but important historical touchstone in our conversation. (New York Public Library)
