The Trump administration has joined a lawsuit attempting to stop a first-of-its-kind reparations plan that would compensate Black residents of a Chicago suburb, arguing that its race-based criteria are unconstitutional.
The program, in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, offers Black residents and their descendants up to $25,000 for past raced-based housing discrimination. When the city’s program was approved in 2021, it was hailed as a model for reparations movements across the US.
The US Department of Justice is wading into the legal fray two years after the conservative activist group Judicial Watch first filed the lawsuit on behalf of six plaintiffs whose parents or grandparents lived in Evanston, and argued their rights were violated under the equal protection clause since they were excluded from receiving reparations because they were not Black.