Sunday, July 19, 2026
Jamelle Bouie July 18, 2026 Ketanji Brown Jackson Knows What 1776 Meant
Jamelle Bouie
Ketanji Brown Jackson Knows What 1776 Meant
“You’re reading the Jamelle Bouie newsletter. Historical context for present-day events.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a long essay on the revolutionary meaning of the Declaration of Independence and how it was given life by the Black Americans, free and enslaved, who wielded its language of equality against bondage and racial discrimination. Unexpectedly, the piece made for good reading alongside Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s concurrence in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case that was decided just before the Fourth of July.
In Trump v. Barbara, a 6-3 majority of the court struck down President Trump’s 2025 executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship for certain categories of immigrants. But of that majority, only five justices held that the executive order was also unconstitutional, rather than simply unlawful.
The principal dissent was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, who argued that the citizenship clause was a narrow remedy meant exclusively for the formerly enslaved. The 14th Amendment does not, in his view, cover undocumented immigrants or, potentially, anyone that the president deems to be unlawfully on American soil.
Writing primarily in response to Thomas, Jackson challenges this interpretation of the 14th Amendment, showing readers that the authors of the citizenship clause were informed by decades of work performed by Black Americans. Speaking through hundreds of “colored conventions” — which we have discussed before — Black Americans both claimed their “native-born” citizenship and articulated visions of a broad, egalitarian citizenship, based on birth and open to all:
Delegates to the Colored Conventions drew upon their own experiences to successfully argue for a new Constitution — one that protected fundamental human rights, including an individual’s “‘right to own his body and mind’” and “the right of personal security and protection against injuries to our bodies or good name.”
You should read Jackson’s concurrence as a complement to my essay because we are each telling different parts of the same story: the struggle of Black Americans to realize their freedom and, in the process, forge the path to a freer, more equal United States.
What I Wrote
My column this week was a comment on Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who died last weekend:
It is one thing to go with the flow — Graham was a politician, after all — but it is something else entirely to throw caution to the wind and embrace a man you denounced, just months earlier, as inimical to your basic values — a man who was as unfit for the presidency on Jan. 20, 2017, as he was on Jan. 19, 2017. For someone as eager for rank as Graham, the temptation of power — of real influence over the new administration — was too much to resist. When it came time to choose between his career and his values, Graham chose Trump, and it would define the rest of his life.
Also, on this week’s episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we watched Michael Bay’s 1998 disaster thriller “Armageddon.”
Now Reading
Brenda Wineapple on America’s centennial for The New York Review of Books.
Adom Getachew on how 20th-century anticolonial figures wielded the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence for their own struggles, in Dissent magazine.
In Jewish Currents, 23 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank reflect on their lives and futures.
Adam Serwer on the “colorblind” Supreme Court for The Atlantic.
Zohran Mamdani on Nelson Mandela for The Guardian.
Photo of the Week
A Catholic mission in San Antonio.
Now Eating: Lablabi (Tunisian Chickpea Soup)
Ingredients
For crispy chickpeas
1 ¾ cup cooked chickpeas, or 1 (15-ounce) can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1 teaspoon za’atar, plus more to taste
For soup
1 ½ cups dried chickpeas, soaked overnight and drained
¼ cup plus 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for serving
2 bay leaves
1 ½ teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
½ loaf hearty rustic bread (about 8 ounces)
1 cup chopped onion, from 1 medium onion
6 garlic cloves, minced or finely grated
1 tablespoon ground cumin, plus more for serving
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 tablespoon harissa paste, plus more for serving
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon finely grated lemon zest, for serving
½ cup chopped flat-leaf parsley, for serving
Directions
Prepare the crispy chickpeas: Transfer chickpeas to a rimmed baking sheet lined with a clean dish towel or paper towels. Cover with another towel (or paper towels), rubbing gently to dry. Remove top towel and let air-dry for at least 30 minutes and preferably 1 hour.
As chickpeas dry, start preparing the soup: In a Dutch oven or heavy stockpot, combine soaked chickpeas, 5 cups water, 1 tablespoon olive oil, bay leaves and ½ teaspoon salt over high heat. Bring to a boil for 2 to 3 minutes, then reduce heat to a simmer, cover and cook until chickpeas are tender, about 1 to 2 hours.
Heat oven to 400 degrees. While chickpeas are cooking, cut bread into thick slices, then tear slices into bite-size pieces. Place bread in one layer on large rimmed baking sheet and toast until crisp and light brown, about 10 minutes. Let cool on pan and set aside.
Finish the crunchy chickpeas: Raise oven temperature to 425 degrees. Remove the towels from baking sheet with the chickpeas, and toss the chickpeas with 2 teaspoons olive oil, ½ teaspoon salt and za’atar until well coated. Roast until golden and crispy, about 13 to 18 minutes, tossing halfway through. When chickpeas are still hot, sprinkle lightly more salt. Taste and add more salt or za’atar, or both, if you’d like.
When the chickpeas for the soup are tender, discard bay leaves. Using a slotted spoon, transfer 2 cups of chickpeas, ½ cup of chickpea cooking liquid and ¼ cup olive oil to a blender or food processor, and purée until smooth.
In a large skillet over medium-high, heat the remaining 2 tablespoons oil until shimmering. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and cook until golden, about 2 minutes. Add the remaining 1 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon cumin and tomato paste and cook, stirring, until fragrant, 1 minute. Add a splash of the chickpea cooking liquid to the pan, and bring to a simmer to deglaze, scraping up the browned bits on the bottom of the pan. Turn off heat.
Add chickpea purée and onion mixture to soup, along with harissa and lemon juice, and stir well. Add a little water if soup seems too thick, and more salt, if needed.
To serve, divide toasted bread pieces among soup bowls, then ladle in soup. Garnish with lemon zest, parsley, olive oil, more cumin and some of the crispy chickpeas — you’ll have leftovers. Serve hot, with more harissa on the side.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.“
They Were Charged With Assaulting ICE Agents. The Cases Are Crumbling.
They Were Charged With Assaulting ICE Agents. The Cases Are Crumbling.
“The Trump administration has lost or abandoned hundreds of criminal cases against protesters and immigrants, a Times investigation found.
In its nationwide immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has charged hundreds of people with assaulting or impeding federal agents. President Trump has branded them “insurrectionists,” “animals” and “thugs,” part of a broader effort by his administration to cast protesters and immigrants as violent criminals.
But a close examination of those cases reveals that in its rush to meet White House demands for deportations, federal law enforcement has engaged in extensive misconduct — ranging from attacking protesters to destroying evidence and misrepresenting facts in court.
The New York Times found that the Trump administration has filed assault charges against more than 550 people who were caught in its immigration dragnet — far more than previously known. Of the more than 400 cases resolved so far, nearly half have unraveled: Juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them.
The record is abysmal by the typical standards of federal prosecutions: The Justice Department seldom loses criminal cases, with more than 90 percent of defendants pleading guilty or being convicted at trial.
The Times obtained court filings for every assault case and reviewed hearing transcripts, interviewed witnesses and federal officials and watched videos of dozens of encounters that led to criminal charges. The review, the most comprehensive to date, suggests that the administration’s use of the law has often been less about protecting federal agents than about providing legal cover to cow protesters and immigrants into submission.
“There seems to be a pattern of charges being filed without any merit,” said Jimmy L. Arce, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago who served on a commission that investigated immigration raids in the city last year. He added that some defendants were “having their speech criminalized by the U.S. attorney’s office.”
Earlier this year, the Trump administration dialed back some of its most confrontational tactics, leading to fewer assault charges. But it recently began an aggressive new wave of enforcement, with agents killing two immigrants in Texas and Maine. With hundreds of cases resolved, it is now possible to more fully assess the administration’s conduct and results.
In the half of assault cases that ended in the government’s favor, almost all were guilty pleas. The Times’s analysis of the 213 cases that the government has lost or abandoned found that:
In dozens of cases, court records and videos show that federal agents were the first to get physical — including shoving, tackling or pepper-spraying defendants. Many defendants successfully argued that the assaults they were accused of were actually acts of self-defense.
Judges repeatedly chastised prosecutors and immigration agents for misconduct including distorting facts and withholding evidence. Two judges found that agents purposely destroyed evidence, including ordering a defendant to delete cellphone photos.
Officers charged more than two dozen people who were filming or following agents, often while honking car horns, blowing whistles or shouting warnings like, “La migra is coming!” There was no allegation of physical contact with agents.
In more than 100 cases, prosecutors did not claim that any agents were injured. In at least seven other cases, officers’ injuries were caused by their or their colleagues’ actions. For example, a judge last fall dismissed assault charges against an immigrant, ruling that the agent involved had been cut by shards of glass from a car window he himself had smashed.
Sixty-five times, prosecutors abandoned or downgraded charges before hitting a deadline to present evidence to a grand jury or judge. Former prosecutors said that this pattern of rapid retreat was unusual and signaled that the cases should never have been brought.
Dropping charges
The government has lost or abandoned nearly half of the resolved cases in which it accused people of assaulting immigration agents. Normally the Justice Department wins more than 90 percent of its criminal cases.
The Trump administration’s strategy hinges on a once-obscure statute, 18 U.S.C. 111, that makes it a federal crime to assault or forcibly impede a government officer. Punishments range from a fine to 20 years in prison.
For decades, prosecutors used the law sparingly. One exception was when the Biden administration invoked it to charge hundreds of people involved in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Prosecutors had a perfect record of winning convictions in those cases, until Mr. Trump returned to office and issued blanket pardons.
As the Trump administration’s efforts to round up undocumented immigrants encountered resistance last year, officials embraced an expansive reading of the assault statute as a way to arrest and prosecute people who got in the way of ICE and Border Patrol agents. The government’s reliance on the statute became so great that agents at times called out “18 U.S.C. 111” as they got into scuffles and made arrests.
Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, declined to comment on specific incidents but said that “it should come as no surprise that there’s an increase in criminal referrals under 18 U.S.C. 111 as there’s been a massive increase in violence and threats against federal law enforcement.”
A Justice Department spokesman, Wyn Hornbuckle, echoed that. “Federal prosecutors are correct to prioritize these prosecutions and hold individuals accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” he said, adding that prosecutors sometimes downgraded or dropped charges based on “mitigating factors identified in a case.” Another Justice Department official said that in some instances prosecutors dropped charges when defendants were deported.
Gregory Bovino, the former Border Patrol “commander at large” who championed the use of smashmouth tactics against protesters and immigrants, was blunter. He said in an interview that too many “worthless” federal prosecutors chickened out by abandoning assault cases. And he thought more protesters and immigrants should have been prosecuted.
“We were being overly judicious in who we charged with 18 U.S.C. 111,” he said.
On occasion, officers were seriously hurt by protesters or immigrants, The Times found. In June last year, Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala, a sex offender in the United States illegally, drove away while a federal agent had an arm inside the car window. The agent — who months later would kill the protester Renee Good in Minnesota — was dragged about 100 yards.
Mr. Muñoz-Guatemala is one of only four people in the Times analysis who was convicted by a jury. The other 22 who faced jury trials were acquitted. Nearly 200 others had the charges dismissed — including two mothers from Charlotte, N.C.
‘We Need Help Right Now’
Tatyana Reisini and her friend Kristen Roos were cornered. A group of armed men, some wearing masks, had surrounded their car on a dead-end street. The women screamed to a 911 operator for help.
Earlier that November morning, the two young mothers had been on their way to a Christmas market in Charlotte. They saw a car filled with immigration agents pulling into the parking lot of an outdoor shopping mall.
Operation Charlotte’s Web, as the immigration sweep in the city was known, followed a bloody and high-profile operation in Chicago. Ms. Reisini, 36, and Ms. Roos, 33, were wary of what might happen in North Carolina.
Ms. Reisini, an American citizen of Ecuadorean descent, and Ms. Roos had been organizing with other local mothers to be on the lookout for immigration agents. So they steered into the parking lot, stopping about 20 yards from the government vehicles. Other protesters were already gathered. They all began yelling at the agents.
After a few minutes, the agents moved their vehicles in front of and behind Ms. Reisini’s Acura S.U.V., she said. Several agents stepped out. Ms. Roos remembered them shouting at her and Ms. Reisini to leave and “trying to scare us.” The women drove to another part of the parking lot and watched as the agents pinned in another protester’s car.
The agents eventually drove off, and Ms. Reisini and Ms. Roos resumed their trip to the Christmas market, at one point stopping to alert a resident that federal officers were nearby.
Soon the women realized they were being followed by two unmarked cars. They called 911. An operator told them to find the nearest gas or police station, but they didn’t know where one was.
Ma’am,
are you able to safely get to a nearby police station or …
I am trying to …
I’m trying to get to a police station,
but they’re not —
they’re literally following me.
So every time I get to like a stoplight or something, they —
they’re trying to get in front of me.
They’re intimidating us.
Instead they wound up on the dead-end street. They turned into a driveway in a housing development. The unmarked cars blocked them in.
“We need help right now,” Ms. Reisini exclaimed to the 911 operator. “They’re going to [expletive] hurt us!”
Just then, an agent began smashing the driver’s side window — with the barrel of his rifle, which was pointed toward Ms. Reisini, according to footage recorded by a nearby resident.
The women were terrified; their shrieks can be heard on the 911 recording.
I am in an apartment complex right now.
It’s,
it’s
a —
they’re breaking open the window!
“We didn’t do anything,” Ms. Reisini said.
“Yes, you did,” an agent responded. “You impeded. 18 U.S.C. 111. Driving erratic.”
Lawyers said that was a misreading of the statute, which specifies that it applies when people use or threaten force. “It’s not enough to show that they might have been interfering with what was happening,” said Carissa Hessick, a University of North Carolina law professor.
Ms. Reisini and Ms. Roos were led from the car, and their hands were zip-tied behind their backs. One agent noticed a child seat in Ms. Reisini’s car and sarcastically remarked that she must be a “stellar” mother, she recalled.
Ms. Reisini retorted that she was, in fact, a stellar mother, which was why she was protesting against agents who she thought were breaking up families in her community.
The women were taken to the local F.B.I. building, where they spent several hours in confinement and eventually received tickets accusing them of violating 18 U.S.C. 111.
Mr. Bovino, who was running the Charlotte operation, shared a social media post from a far-right account that called the women “liberal terrorists,” and he praised what he called “excellent arrests for assault.” Yet the charges were so weak that the U.S. attorney’s office in Charlotte eventually withdrew them.
Asked about the agent’s use of a rifle muzzle to smash Ms. Reisini’s window, Mr. Bovino said he wasn’t concerned about the risk to the car’s occupants. “I’m more worried about the officer getting hurt or killed or the public getting hurt or killed, not necessarily the suspect,” he said.
Shoved by Bovino
Mr. Bovino’s crackdown soon moved to Minneapolis.
On Jan. 7, hours after Ms. Good was killed, Quentin Williams, a special education assistant at a high school about three miles away, was helping direct students to their rides after school.
He spotted a group of federal agents who had come onto campus while arresting someone. Mr. Williams moved toward a crowd that had gathered to watch. Some were yelling at or filming the agents.
Mr. Bovino ran up and shoved Mr. Williams, videos show. In an ensuing skirmish, agents yanked Mr. Williams by the hair, tackled him and, he said, choked him.
“I could not help but think of George Floyd,” Mr. Williams wrote later that day, memorializing the incident. “I was so scared for my life.”
Mr. Bovino said Mr. Williams was among a group of “rioters and anarchists” who failed to follow orders from law enforcement.
Mr. Williams was arrested, taken to a federal building and released that same day. Agents told him they’d be in touch.
About two weeks later, the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis charged Mr. Williams and 15 others for violating 18 U.S.C. 111. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, announced the charges on social media, posting photos of Mr. Williams and other shackled defendants, who she said were “resisting and impeding our federal law enforcement agents.” She cited the statute but left out its language about it applying when people “forcibly” interfere.
In a sworn affidavit, an investigator from the Department of Homeland Security said that an agent at the scene had seen Mr. Williams trying to grab and pick up a Border Patrol agent — a claim that Mr. Williams denied and that was not supported by video of the incident that The Times reviewed.
The U.S. attorney’s office later reduced the charge to a misdemeanor and ultimately dropped the case altogether.
The Times identified numerous other cases in which people were charged with assault even though officers were the ones who appeared to have used physical force first.
One involved Jaime Diaz, an undocumented Honduran man who was arrested last July during a traffic stop in Laredo, Texas. Prosecutors charged him with assault, saying he had struck a Border Patrol officer “two to three times.” But during his trial, body-camera video showed Mr. Diaz, who is slightly built and under five feet tall, being grabbed by the neck, forced to the ground and punched by the much larger officer as he tried to handcuff him.
A federal jury acquitted Mr. Diaz in November. He was then scheduled for deportation.
“In the past, this officer could’ve been prosecuted, based on the body cams,” said his lawyer, Roberto Balli. “And instead we have my client being prosecuted.”
A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in South Texas said that Mr. Diaz elbowed the officer. “The jury did acquit the defendant, but it was a righteous prosecution,” she said.
In more than 20 cases that the government lost or abandoned, protesters and immigrants argued that what the government said was assault was instead self-defense.
In May last year, Josefina Gabriel-Lopez, a Guatemalan immigrant, was pulling into her driveway in Biloxi, Miss., when federal agents suddenly approached and ordered her out of the car.
Ms. Gabriel-Lopez, who doesn’t speak English, didn’t immediately comply. An officer reached through the partly opened window to try to unlock the door, and the window closed on her arm. The agents blamed Ms. Gabriel-Lopez, but she said the officer had accidentally shut the window on herself as she pushed buttons inside the car.
After officers wrenched open the car door, Ms. Gabriel-Lopez struggled against an agent who climbed inside and twisted her arm and wrist before dragging her out. Her 18-year-old daughter ran out of the house barefoot and tugged on an agent’s protective vest.
Both women were arrested and charged with assault. When the case went to trial in September, they argued that they had acted in self-defense.
“I wasn’t resisting,” Ms. Gabriel-Lopez told jurors through an interpreter. She added, “I keep telling him it was painful, it was painful. He did not listen to me.”
The jury found the women not guilty. Ms. Gabriel-Lopez, who had entered the United States illegally in 2005, was later deported.
Scolded by the Court
The Times identified more than 30 instances of judges criticizing prosecutors or federal agents for conduct such as destroying or withholding evidence, violating rules about communications with jurors and making false or exaggerated claims, including some disproved by videos.
Judges have denounced the government’s actions as “flagrant,” in “bad faith” and “shocking to the universal sense of justice.”
One case of evidence being destroyed took place last September in San Bernardino, Calif. Federal agents were following a Nicaraguan man, Joseph Blandon-Saavedra, who was driving to work in a Toyota Corolla. At an intersection, the agents boxed him in with their two cars, smashed his window and arrested him.
All three vehicles were damaged. Mr. Blandon-Saavedra said the agents had hit his car when they cut him off. But the government said he had rammed them, and prosecutors charged him with two counts of assaulting officers with his sedan.
Mr. Blandon-Saavedra’s lawyers asked that the cars be preserved so their expert could examine them. But agents immediately repaired one of theirs.
The judge dismissed the count tied to the repaired vehicle, calling the agents’ actions part of a “growing pattern of mishandling evidence” that might undermine officers’ assault claims. Prosecutors appealed the dismissal. The count related to the other government vehicle is pending.
In April, a federal judge in Los Angeles threw out assault charges against two protesters, in the middle of a trial, after finding that prosecutors had failed to turn over internal “use-of-force” reports that could have been helpful to the defense. A month later, the government dropped charges against six protesters in Chicago after a judge criticized prosecutors for having mishandled a grand jury, partly by speaking to jurors outside the courtroom.
In Laredo, Ariana Guadalupe Garcia, a 19-year-old American, arrived at a border crossing last July to meet her young niece. Ms. Garcia, who had come from the U.S. side, had clothes for the girl to bring back to a relative in Mexico to sell, a common exchange at border crossings.
But Ms. Garcia found that the girl, who had arrived from Mexico, was being held in an inspection area, and when she tried to speak to her through a window, an officer told her to leave. Ms. Garcia did not immediately obey, prompting several other officers to approach her. After some back-and-forth, the officers began escorting Ms. Garcia away, according to court records.
As they passed through a short stretch of walkway with no working security cameras, Ms. Garcia took at least one photo with her phone. An officer swatted it away. Prosecutors said that Ms. Garcia then hit an officer on the arm and another in the ear, which she denied. She was arrested and later charged with assault.
Afterward, an officer told her to delete the photo she’d just taken, going so far as to watch her permanently erase it from the Recently Deleted folder.
The case against Ms. Garcia began to fall apart when the judge asked how prosecutors intended to prove she had hit anyone — especially since security footage from right before the alleged incident showed no sign of her acting violently toward the four male officers.
The deleted photos were the final straw.
“The government acted in bad faith in destroying the evidence,” the judge wrote, “further demonstrating that Ms. Garcia’s constitutional rights have been violated.”
Methodology
There is no simple way to identify immigration-related cases brought under 18 U.S.C. 111. We searched online databases — Nexis, CourtListener and Pacer (the federal judiciary’s electronic docket) — for all such cases since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term.
We used an artificial intelligence model to help remove duplicate cases, as well as cases unrelated to immigration enforcement. We checked the model’s work. We also requested records from the Central Violations Bureau, part of the federal judiciary, which processes tickets issued for violations of 18 U.S.C. 111. Our review was exhaustive, but it is possible that we missed cases.
We confined our analysis to 18 U.S.C. 111, though the government has occasionally invoked other laws to prosecute people for assaulting officers.
We created a database of court records, including hearing and trial transcripts, for the cases that were dismissed or ended in acquittals. With help from an A.I. model, we looked for common characteristics, such as courts admonishing the government for misconduct or agents initiating physical force against people they arrested. We reviewed every case the model flagged.
We also interviewed federal prosecutors and other experts and examined historical statistics about federal prosecutions, as reported by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Alan Feuer and Will Houp contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research. Produced by Alice Fang and Rumsey Taylor.
Mike McIntire, an investigative reporter, has been with The Times since 2003.
Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics.
Alexandra Berzon is an investigative reporter covering American politics and elections for The Times.
Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times.“
Trump Gutted Civil Rights Agency, Stifling U.S. Scrutiny of Workplace Bias
Trump Gutted Civil Rights Agency, Stifling U.S. Scrutiny of Workplace Bias
“A little-known federal office spent decades investigating potential discrimination by government contractors — until it was stopped by the Trump administration.
Coral Davenport reported from Norfolk, Va., and Washington. She interviewed current and former federal investigators and contractors, and reviewed internal records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Federal investigators were working in early 2025 to wrap up a two-year inquiry into claims of pervasive sexual harassment and discrimination at a company that makes weapons, vehicles and cybersecurity tools for the Pentagon.
The investigators had found, among other things, that some male managers at a Norfolk, Va., Navy shipyard had demanded oral sex and other sexual contact from female employees in exchange for promotions and overtime pay, and that Black women had been paid less and promoted less frequently than men, according to three people with knowledge of the findings.
The government was zeroing in on a resolution to propose to the company, BAE Systems: to make seven-figure payouts to workers and to adopt reforms — or risk losing its roughly $8 billion in annual federal contracts.
Then, the inquiry was suddenly halted.
On Jan. 21, the day after President Trump was inaugurated, he directed the Labor Department office conducting the investigation to stop most of its work, effectively shutting down the inquiry. It was part of a sweeping executive orderpurging the federal government of diversity, equity and inclusion initiativesthat Mr. Trump said had undermined individual achievement in favor of a “pernicious identity-based spoils system.”
The investigators were stunned.
“I wasn’t even allowed to contact the workers,” said Sam Maiden, who led the investigation of BAE and retired from the government last year. “We were so angry that they wouldn’t get the remedy that should have come to them.”
BAE never received the investigation’s findings or the proposed settlement, according to a company spokesman, Tim Paynter, who said an internal investigation did not substantiate employee claims of harassment and discrimination. He said that the company was committed to creating a respectful and equitable workplace, adding: “We do not tolerate harassment or retaliation.”
The abrupt and previously unreported demise of the investigation illustrates the far-reaching impact of Mr. Trump’s moves to unravel anti-discrimination policies enacted more than a half-century ago in response to the civil rights movement.
The BAE inquiry was one of thousands of investigations being conducted at the time by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, an obscure Labor Department agency created in 1965 under President Lyndon B. Johnson to prohibit discrimination by government contractors on the basis of race, religion, gender and national origin.
When Mr. Trump took office last year, the agency had jurisdiction over approximately 35,000 contractors that employed 20 percent of the U.S. work force — about 34 million people.
The office had also become a target for conservative and pro-business groups, which complained that its audits were onerous and unfair. Records show that the agency was scheduled to launch about 2,000 inquiries in 2025, all of which were derailed by Mr. Trump’s order.
Among the companies spared additional scrutiny was Tesla, whose chief executive, Elon Musk, oversaw Mr. Trump’s initiative to shrink the federal government. Records show that the Labor Department office had opened an audit of the company’s Fremont, Calif., plant in October 2024, as Mr. Musk was pouring millions of dollars into the Trump campaign.
Mr. Musk, whose company SpaceX is also a major federal contractor, had long harbored intense antipathy for the agency and its procedures, and was furious about the Tesla investigation, according to two people who worked with him on the matters and spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Two months after Mr. Trump’s executive order, the administration appointed a corporate lawyer to oversee the agency, after she had represented SpaceX in other dealings with the Labor Department and had sued the civil rights office on behalf of another client. She immediately began to dismantle it.
The agency has been gutted, down from about 480 employees on Mr. Trump’s first day in office last year to about 75 as of May. Mr. Trump’s current budget proposal calls for eliminating it entirely, a move the White House argues would ensure fairness for all Americans.
“For far too long, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs has been used to promote and enforce unconstitutional, racially discriminatory employment practices,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman. “By ending the weaponization of the O.F.C.C.P., the president is protecting the basic civil rights of every American to be treated based on their individual merit and hard work, not the color of their skin.”
A spokesman for Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
To understand the impact of the collapse of a key civil rights agency in the heart of the federal government, The New York Times interviewed current and former agency investigators, as well as workers and executives at several contractors that had faced audits. The Times also reviewed written complaints from workers, in addition to legal filings and other documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests. Those included a heavily redacted 100-page report on the BAE inquiry.
Of the investigations thwarted by Mr. Trump’s order, the BAE case stood out to investigators because of the seriousness of the allegations and the fact that the inquiry was so close to a potential settlement.
Government investigators had visited the shipyard and interviewed hundreds of employees, including nearly 100 women who had described their firsthand experiences in detail, investigators said.
Several women interviewed by investigators told The Times that they had hoped a settlement would end their troubles.
Instead, the problems are “all still going on,” said Vernita Thurman, who worked as a painter in the BAE shipyard for 20 years before leaving last year, and who remains in contact with her former colleagues.
Other women who still work at the shipyard offered the same assessment, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.
One said she called the investigators for months after the executive order, with no response. She said she learned that the investigation was over only when a Times reporter contacted her and some of her colleagues.
A Civil Rights-Era Agency Hated by Elon Musk
Since its founding nearly 61 years ago, the Labor Department’s contractor compliance office has conducted tens of thousands of top-down audits of companies, searching for patterns of discrimination in pay, hiring and promotion.
The more well-known Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, another civil rights-era agency upended by the Trump administration, was designed as a forum for workers at any company to file individual discrimination complaints. The Labor Department office, in contrast, initiated audits of government contractors, often randomly and sometimes in response to complaints.
The idea was that any company doing business supported by taxpayers should be held to exemplary standards, and could face scrutiny at any time.
Companies were required to turn over statistics on employee demographics, salaries and hiring, and to make employees available for interviews with investigators. The office typically opened about 2,000 workplace audits every year, with some of the investigations lasting years.
Over time, the office’s mandate grew. The Obama administration added sexual orientation and gender identity to the forms of discrimination it would investigate. It documented many cases of discrimination against women and minorities and, at times, against white men.
Between 2014 and 2024, the office won $260.8 million in compensation for 250,900 workers, according to agency data. More than 22,600 workers received new job opportunities or salary adjustments. There is no public data showing these numbers for the entire life of the agency.
Some of the nation’s biggest companies have been required to respond.
In 2020, for example, the office found that Wells Fargo had discriminated against 34,193 Black job applicants, compelling the financial services company to pay them a combined $7.8 million, reform hiring procedures and report on those changes for five years, records show.
A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo declined to comment.
That year, the nation’s largest business lobby, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, argued in a legal brief that the office should be eliminated, saying its audits “routinely involve excessive and arbitrary demands” leading to “regulatory overreach and coerced settlements,” including “massive monetary awards.”
The group filed its brief as part of dueling lawsuits between Oracle, a technology giant, and the Labor office, which claimed that the company owed $400 million in compensation to underpaid female, Black and Asian employees. Both lawsuits were ultimately dismissed. Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk’s views of the office stemmed from a broader opposition to any government entity that sought access to his companies’ data and practices, according to the two people who worked with him on these issues and spoke with The Times. One said Mr. Musk considered the audit process “emotionally draining.”
The agency had audited two SpaceX launch sites in recent years — in Florida in 2019 and in Texas in 2021 — and found no patterns of discrimination, according to agency records. The Tesla factory under review had been the subject of complaints from some employees, who said they had been subjected to racial slurs and racist images.
Representatives for Tesla and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
The lawyer appointed to lead the office shortly after Mr. Trump’s executive order was Catherine Eschbach, who in addition to her work for SpaceX had represented a separate company that had tangled with the agency.
That firm, a large janitorial contractor called ABM, had undergone audits at 10 sites in 2024, and had engaged in dueling lawsuits with the compliance office.
The agency’s process “violates the Constitution in multiple ways — to say nothing of basic notions of fairness,” Ms. Eschbach wrote in a September 2024 legal complaint.
In December 2024, ABM signed two settlements with the office, which claimed that the company had discriminated against Black and white job applicants in favor of Hispanic applicants. In the settlements, which The Times obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the company agreed to pay $1.1 million to the applicants, and the company agreed to drop its lawsuit against the agency.
A spokesman for ABM, Michael Valentino, told The Times in an email that the company “consistently denied any violation or discrimination.” He said ABM had “acted appropriately and in compliance with applicable law and federal directives at all times.”
After the Trump order in January 2025, the government directed the company “not to implement or pay those agreements,” Mr. Valentino wrote.
The sudden change was striking even to some lawyers who had worked with companies targeted by audits.
“It’s like somebody pulled the plug out of the wall,” said John Fox, a lawyer who has represented ABM and other companies in dealings with the Labor Department office.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Eschbach, who left the office last September and is now an official at the E.E.O.C., referred questions to the Labor Department. In an email, a department spokesman said Ms. Eschbach “had no involvement” in the ABM matter in her role at the agency because the settlements had been closed by Mr. Trump’s executive order, and Ms. Eschbach had not joined the office until March 2025, two months later.
Once she arrived, Ms. Eschbach moved quickly to establish a new direction for the office.
She sent an email to employees during her first week calling for an “autopsy” of “actions and regulations.” In the email, which was viewed by The Times, she directed them to stop much of their work enforcing discrimination rules and investigating companies, and added that many would lose their jobs. “With the administration-wide DOGE agenda, we will be ‘right-sizing’ the agency,” she wrote, using the acronym for the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative headed by Mr. Musk at the start of the Trump administration.
Hundreds of investigators and lawyers were soon put on leave or transferred.
Those who remained were tasked with drafting language to rescind regulations banning most forms of discrimination that the office had spent decades rooting out. They also began reversing rules that required contractors to maintain a workplace free of harassment, and that prohibited them from retaliating against applicants and employees for discussing their pay.
Ms. Eschbach wrote that the office would continue to enforce two regulations barring discrimination against veterans and people with disabilities, since those groups were still covered by separate laws.
While thousands of companies avoided additional scrutiny after Mr. Trump’s order, some of the largest of those firms had forged close ties with the president and his administration.
Among them were Amazon, Google, Meta and the construction equipment company Caterpillar, all of which donated to Mr. Trump’s inauguration and would later contribute to the construction of a new White House ballroom.
Audits of Amazon, Meta and Caterpillar that had begun in 2024 were killed. Google had been scheduled for a 2025 review. None of the companies responded to requests for comment.
Legal experts said that without the compliance audits, many workers may never know about discrimination in wages, hiring and promotion, which can be invisible without access to the kinds of records that companies were required to provide.
“It proactively audited federal contractors before workers even knew they were being discriminated against,” said Jessica Stender, the policy director at Equal Rights Advocates, a nonprofit legal organization that represents workers. “Now that oversight is gone.”
Claims of Sex Acts for Overtime
The BAE shipyard in Norfolk had been a target of worker complaints for years.
In 2013, 166 female shipyard workers sued the company for harassment and discrimination, winning a $3 million settlement that was distributed among the plaintiffs, although the company denied liability. The settlement, reached in 2016, also required shipyard managers to follow a detailed list of procedures aimed at ensuring that women would be protected from harassment, and that they would be more equitably paid and promoted.
But when the settlement expired after two years, the troubles re-emerged, said Joshua Friedman, a lawyer for the employees.
Mr. Friedman advised his clients to file complaints with the Labor Department’s compliance office.
“We thought the federal investigation might be able to make it stop,” Mr. Friedman said.
The Labor Department investigators began their audit in April 2022.
They walked through the shipyard, where they found sexist and racist graffiti, the investigators said in interviews.
Women told investigators that some male managers had used sexually explicit nicknames to address female workers, according to interviews with the investigators and employees, and documents viewed by The Times. Workers told investigators that the troubling behavior occurred repeatedly over years, often from the same small group of managers.
One worker said that a manager told her that he would “put a baby in her,” documents show. Another said she was routinely asked what color underwear she was wearing.
When women refused demands by some managers for sex acts in exchange for overtime pay, managers would retaliate, the investigators said. Their report cited actions such as “lowering performance evaluations, inequitable distribution of overtime hours, job assignments, and retaliatory write-ups.”
“Everyone saw what was going on, the patterns,” said Ms. Thurman, the former painter at the shipyard. “All the shenanigans. All the years of not getting the same pay. And you know you won’t get a fair chance when you go to HR.”
BAE did not provide specific answers to a detailed list of questions about the investigation.
Mr. Maiden, the lead investigator, said the evidence was so sound that he was confident a settlement would compensate the workers and compel the company to halt similar practices in all of its work sites.
“We were all ready to go with it, writing it up,” said Mr. Maiden.
After Mr. Trump signed the order, the acting labor secretary directed the office to “cease and desist all investigative and enforcement activity.”
The employee interviews and the data the investigators had gathered would be for nothing. The payments and workplace reforms they had hoped to propose would never come to pass.
Andrea Fuller contributed reporting. Research was contributed by Susan C. Beachy, Kitty Bennett, Alain Delaquérière and Kirsten Noyes.
Coral Davenport covers energy and environment policy, with a focus on climate change, for The Times.“
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