The Justice Department announced this week that it is seeking to end more than 50 long-standing legal agreements known as consent decrees, which were originally put in place to address racial segregation in schools. These decrees, which date back several decades, were designed to ensure that schools did not unlawfully separate students based on race. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, said the department is ending these agreements because they no longer reflect current conditions in schools. She described the decrees as "onerous and outdated." However, a federal judge must approve the dismissal of each decree, and it remains unclear how many of the 50 cases will be formally dropped. The history of these consent decrees is rooted in the Jim Crow era, a period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when many Southern states enforced racial segregation through laws that required separate public facilities for Black and white people. This system was upheld by the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the "separate but equal" doctrine. However, this doctrine was overturned in 1954 with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Following this, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department worked with school districts through consent decrees to ensure compliance with the law and to eliminate racial discrimination. As of May 2022, the Justice Department was still involved in about 140 desegregation cases. In recent years, the department has filed motions to dismiss several of these cases, arguing that the affected school districts have achieved "unitary status," meaning they no longer have lingering effects of past segregation. Some judges have agreed to dismiss these cases, particularly in states like Tennessee, Florida, and Mississippi. The Justice Department is now conducting a review of all remaining cases from the 1960s and 1970s, with the goal of seeking dismissal where appropriate. Critics of the Justice Department's move argue that ending these consent decrees could lead to a resurgence of racial segregation in schools. Kristen Clarke, a former assistant attorney general and now general counsel at the NAACP, said that the current administration's efforts to end these agreements undermine the progress made since Brown v. Board of Education. She emphasized that these agreements have provided important protections for students facing discrimination and that their removal could threaten educational equity. Meanwhile, Dhillon has been reshaping the Civil Rights Division by focusing on different priorities, including opposing diversity initiatives and challenging policies related to transgender athletes and voter registration. This has led to significant staff turnover within the division.