US agreement offers a way to shift school civil rights enforcement to Justice Department

The administration has not released details on whether the Office for Civil Rights has begun transferring its responsibilities under the June 2026 agreement, or what the transfer would look like. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said the Justice Department would handle the office's complaints "from soup to nuts," taking on "99 percent" of the work.

OCR is the office within the Department of Education that enforces federal statutes protecting students from discrimination, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars schools receiving federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, colour or national origin. The agreement is another step toward the administration's 2025 promise to close the Department of Education, a step only Congress can take.

In the 2024 fiscal year, from October 2023 to September 2024, OCR received a record 22,687 complaints while employing just under 600 full-time equivalent staff, and complaint numbers climbed further in the following year. By November 2025 the office had 446 staff. The Justice Department's Educational Opportunities Section, which would take on the work, employed about 40 lawyers in January 2025 and had lost the majority of its staff by June 2025.

OCR and the Justice Department enforce civil rights law differently. OCR is required to consider every complaint it receives and to promptly investigate those showing possible violations, aiming traditionally to resolve them within 180 days. The Justice Department's section, by contrast, selects a small fraction of cases, usually systemic or particularly severe discrimination, and pursues them in federal court, where resolution can take years. OCR itself is under strain: it did not resolve about 30 percent of complaints within 180 days in the 2024 fiscal year, and a January 2026 federal watchdog report found it dismissed about 90 percent of complaints for part of 2025.

Since January 2025, the administration has closed seven of OCR's 12 regional offices. It tried to lay off approximately half of OCR's workforce in March, with additional layoffs in October, but withdrew those layoffs following successful legal challenges. According to findings from a Senate committee report chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders, OCR reached resolution agreements in less than 1 percent of pending cases in 2025, down from 5 percent in 2024. The authors write that the agreements focused heavily on administration priorities, such as ending transgender students' use of restrooms consistent with their gender identity, and included no resolution of a complaint of sexual harassment, restraint or seclusion, racial harassment or discriminatory student discipline.

Bridget Joyce and Kimberly Robinson, who spent a combined 17 years at the Department of Education, argue that students lose their guarantee that a federal agency will review and evaluate their allegations if OCR's enforcement moves to the Justice Department. They ask how and whether a complaint like the one lodged against the Ottumwa Community School District would be resolved if filed today. In December 2022, OCR found the district had violated Title VI by failing to address racial harassment: a student was called "blackie," "slave" and "cotton picker" among other slurs, and, according to the complaint, a white student knelt on a Gatorade bottle saying "It can't breathe," mocking the murder of George Floyd. The district agreed to reimburse the student's family for therapy and to train students and staff.