Chris Cameron
Reporting from Washington
The judge’s ruling temporarily halts any stoppage on federal diversity initiatives.
A federal judge in Maryland has temporarily blocked some enforcement of a series of executive orders by President Trump targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs, halting a widespread crackdown on such initiatives across the federal government.
In his ruling late Friday, Judge Adam B. Abelson of the District of Maryland said that the defendants shall not “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate any awards, contracts or obligations,” or “change the terms of any current obligation” related to equity programs. The executive orders had required a halt to spending on diversity initiatives throughout the federal government.
Judge Abelson wrote in his opinion that the plaintiffs in the case — groups representing college professors and school diversity officers — had established that they would suffer irreparable harm under the order, and had “shown they are likely to prove” that provisions of the orders were “unconstitutionally vague on their face,” and beyond that, provisions of the orders “squarely, unconstitutionally,” violated freedom of speech.
“As plaintiffs put it, ‘efforts to foster inclusion have been widespread and uncontroversially legal for decades,’” Judge Abelson wrote, adding that “plaintiffs’ irreparable harms include widespread chilling of unquestionably protected speech.”
The Trump administration has moved to shut down diversity initiatives in government agencies, going so far as to quickly take down government web pages that referred to equal employment opportunity programs and diversity initiatives.
Among the most aggressive orders signed by Mr. Trump were ones that mandated the immediate purge of hiring practices that sought to reverse the effects of systemic discrimination against women, minorities and people with disabilities. Administration officials also threatened federal employees with “adverse consequences” if they failed to report on colleagues who defied the orders.
Judge Abelson made note of the Trump administration’s aggressive moves in his ruling, writing that the orders sought to punish people for constitutionally protected speech.
“The White House and Attorney General have made clear,” Judge Abelson wrote, that “viewpoints and speech considered to be in favor of or supportive of D.E.I.” are “viewpoints the government wishes to punish and, apparently, attempt to extinguish.”
He continued, “As the Supreme Court has made clear time and time again, the government cannot rely on the ‘threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion’ to suppress disfavored speech.”
On Wednesday, civil rights organizations sued the Trump administration, alleging that the D.E.I. orders were discriminatory and illegal, and imperiled funding for groups that provide critical services to historically underserved groups of Americans.
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