The Trump administration has moved to join a lawsuit seeking to halt the country’s first and only operating reparations program for Black residents, placing the Department of Justice on the side of a conservative legal challenge to a local effort in Evanston, Illinois, that was designed to address decades of documented housing discrimination.
The federal filing targets a program approved by Evanston in 2021, when the Chicago suburb became the first city in the United States to launch a reparations plan of its kind. The program provides eligible applicants up to $25,000 for housing-related costs, including home repairs, down payments, mortgage payments, interest fees, and late penalties tied to property in Evanston. It was created to respond to discriminatory housing policies that pushed Black residents into segregated neighborhoods and restricted access to homeownership, lending, and generational wealth.
The case now places Evanston’s local reparations program at the center of a national legal and political fight over whether governments may use race-conscious remedies to repair race-specific harms. The Justice Department argues that Evanston’s program is unconstitutional because it allots benefits based on race. Reparations advocates and city officials counter that the program is a narrowly tailored response to a specific record of public and private housing discrimination that harmed Black families in Evanston for generations.
The original lawsuit was filed in 2024 by Judicial Watch, a right-wing legal group, on behalf of six plaintiffs whose parents or grandparents lived in Evanston. The plaintiffs argue that their rights were violated under the Equal Protection Clause because they are not Black and therefore do not qualify through the program’s Black resident or descendant eligibility pathway.
In its filing, the Justice Department called the program “racially discriminatory.” Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, framed the program as an unlawful distribution of public benefits.
“Under the pretext of paying reparations for events more than 100 years ago, the city of Evanston has chosen to distribute millions of dollars in cash and housing benefits to people because of the color of their skin,” Dhillon said.
Dhillon also said, “There are sound ways for a city to remedy past discrimination or direct resources to its most vulnerable citizens and neighborhoods. Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer.”
Evanston officials have rejected that framing. Mayor Daniel Biss said the city was reviewing the Justice Department filing and stood behind the program. “[We] are confident in its constitutionality, and look forward to defending it in court,” Biss said.
The reparations program was approved with a $20 million allocation and is funded by local cannabis taxes. Since its launch, the city has distributed more than $6 million to hundreds of residents, with the provided reports placing the total between $6.3 million and $7 million. The program is limited in scope and use. Recipients do not receive unrestricted payments. Funds must go toward housing costs, a limitation that has drawn criticism from some reparations supporters who argue that the money can flow back to banks and other institutions that contributed to discriminatory housing systems.
Eligibility is also more specific than the Justice Department’s description suggests. Black residents who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 and experienced discriminatory housing policies may apply. Their direct descendants may also qualify. Residents of any race who experienced housing discrimination after 1969 can also apply, but they must show proof of discriminatory policies or practices.
That structure reflects the history the program was built to address. In 1919, during the Great Migration, Black families moved in large numbers to Midwestern cities, including Evanston, to escape the Jim Crow South. Evanston, located less than 20 miles from Chicago, responded with racial zoning policies and discriminatory housing practices that restricted where Black families could live.
Black residents were prevented from buying or renting homes in much of the city. Banks refused loans to many Black families. Property owners would not sell or rent to Black residents in large sections of Evanston. Those policies and practices pushed Black families into the city’s historically Black 5th Ward, where residents faced segregation, disinvestment, and neglect.
The program’s supporters argue that those harms were not abstract. They affected where Black residents could live, whether they could secure mortgages, whether they could build home equity, and what kind of wealth they could pass to their children. The damage of redlining, exclusionary zoning, downzoning, household occupancy limits, and mortgage discrimination did not disappear when formal policies changed. It shaped neighborhood wealth, housing stability, public investment, and health outcomes across generations.
Robin Rue Simmons, who served as alderman of Evanston’s historically Black 5th Ward and spearheaded the reparations program, has described the lawsuit as part of a broader effort to frighten other cities away from similar policies.
“This lawsuit is designed to intimidate and discourage other communities that are beginning their process of reparations, inspired by what Evanston has done,” Simmons said.
She also said the Trump administration’s attempt to join the case is an “attack on the revived hope that Black communities have felt having a path, through a hyperlocal process, to reparations.”
The timing and target of the Justice Department’s intervention are significant. Evanston’s program grew out of the national racial justice movement that followed the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, when protests against police violence and systemic racism spread across the country. In the aftermath, more than a dozen cities created task forces to study reparations for descendants of slavery and communities harmed by anti-Black discrimination. Evanston, however, remains the only city to carry out a program.
That makes the lawsuit more than a local dispute. If the challenge succeeds, it could discourage municipalities from moving beyond studies, commissions, or symbolic resolutions. Cities considering reparations may face the prospect of costly litigation, federal opposition, and constitutional challenges even when their programs are tied to documented local harms.
Judicial Watch attorney Michael Bekesha, who initially sued Evanston on behalf of the plaintiffs, argues that the city’s program is not sufficiently connected to specific injuries suffered by specific people. He has compared Evanston’s approach unfavorably with other reparations programs, including compensation for Japanese people imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II and people tortured by Chicago police between the 1970s and early 1990s.
“Reparations programs aren’t new, but they’ve always been lawful, they’ve always been connected to specific harms, specific injuries suffered by specific individuals,” Bekesha said. “And here in Evanston, there is no connection between the individuals receiving the money and any action taken by the city of Evanston at any point.”
Simmons rejects that claim. She argues that Evanston’s program is directly tied to the city’s own housing record and the measurable harm experienced by Black residents who lived under those conditions or descended from those who did.
The program also sits within a broader conservative effort to challenge race-conscious policies by framing them as discrimination against non-Black residents. Under Trump, civil rights enforcement has increasingly been turned against diversity, equity, inclusion, and remedial programs that were designed to address longstanding inequities. In Evanston, that strategy is being tested against a reparations policy that is local, housing-specific, and limited in the amount and use of funds.
At the same time, the program’s own limitations remain part of the debate. Some critics of Evanston’s model argue that restricting funds to property-related uses narrows the meaning of reparations and reduces recipients’ control over how repair should occur. Others argue that the restrictions were necessary to tie the remedy to the documented housing discrimination that shaped Black life in Evanston for decades. That tension has made the program both a national model and a contested first step.
The continued effects of segregation remain visible in the city. According to a 2022 study cited in the provided material, residents in Evanston’s predominantly Black neighborhoods have a 13-year life expectancy gap compared with residents in mostly white neighborhoods. That figure does not reduce the city’s racial inequities to housing policy alone, but it points to the long relationship between segregation, disinvestment, wealth, health, and public resources.
Now, the legal question before the court could determine whether Evanston’s effort is allowed to continue or whether the nation’s first functioning reparations program becomes a warning to other cities.
For Simmons, the case comes back to whether the city is permitted to repair a harm that was local, documented, and generational. “I do believe strongly that the applicants who lived in Evanston during the eligibility period, and their descendants, experienced calculated harm that was quantifiable,” Simmons said.
COMMENTS