#affirmative action

By: Office of Public Affairs

Published: May 14, 2026

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has completed a year-long investigation into the admissions policies and practices at the Yale School of Medicine.

Yale’s documents show that its leadership intentionally selected applicants based on their race. Yale’s documents reveal that they studied how to use racial proxies to circumvent the Supreme Court’s prohibition on using race to select students. Yale’s admissions data demonstrate that Black and Hispanic students have a much higher chance of admission to Yale than White or Asian students with the same test scores.

“Yale has continued its race-based admissions program despite the Supreme Court and the public’s clear mandate for reform.” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “This Department will continue to shed light on these illegal practices, and demand that institutions of higher education comply with federal law.”

The investigation showed that, in general, Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted with consistently lower academic qualifications than their White and Asian counterparts. These facts support the Department’s finding that Yale violated the law by intentionally discriminating based on race in its admissions, in clear violation of federal law.

Medical schools use substantial federal financial assistance to train the next generation of doctors. The Department is continuing its focus on eradicating illegal race politics from admissions at medical schools, where quality and excellence are vitally important to public safety.

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Hopefully this serves as a warning to every other institutionally racist university.

Oliver Willis at Daily Kos:

Donald Trump has a long history of racism, from excusing the actions of Nazis to promoting the racist birther conspiracy theory. Trump also surrounds himself with racist advisers like Stephen Miller, who is currently formulating the administration’s harsh immigration policy. Trump continued this approach in the first few days of his second presidency by issuing a series of executive orders meant to undo past actions by the U.S. government to address the harmful effects of racism. Trump and his fellow Republicans have for years attacked programs meant to counter racism and encourage diversity, attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. They have falsely claimed that these programs prioritize mediocrity over qualified individuals and decision making. But in reality, the anti-DEI crusade has been a smokescreen for rolling back civil rights.

In his executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” the Trump administration made this posture clear. The order explicitly rescinds Executive Order 11246, which President Lyndon Johnson signed in 1965—an order Johnson used to desegregate federal contracting. As the Department of Labor website explains (for now, at least), the Johnson order “reinforced the requirement that federal contractors not discriminate in employment and take affirmative action to ensure equal opportunity based on race, color, religion, and national origin.” The department also notes that the Johnson order—now gone, thanks to Trump’s actions—were a “key landmark in a series of federal actions aimed at ending racial, religious and ethnic discrimination.” Reversing an order meant to attack racism and pro-segregation policies was described by the Trump administration in a release as “protecting civil rights and expanding individual opportunity.”

[...] The administration issued an order instructing the Department of Transportation and the FAA to “immediately stop Biden DEI hiring programs and return to non-discriminatory, merit-based hiring.” The order claimed without evidence that increasing diversity in transportation programs somehow makes travel more dangerous for Americans. As evidence, the administration pointed to a January 2023 FAA outage as “an illustration of the importance of FAA competence.” But in reality, as the FAA determined at the time of the outage, the cause was a corrupted database issue that occurred when files were deleted by mistake by a contractor. That’s not exactly a diversity issue.

Racist-in-Chief kills LBJ’s 1965 EO that desegregated federal contracting as part of his racist quest to end DEI programs.

See Also:

Vox: Trump’s sweeping new order tries to dismantle DEI in government — and the private sector