Judge Declines to Block Portions of Trump’s DEI Executive Orders

A federal judge on Friday declined to block enforcement of provisions in President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), in response to a lawsuit filed by pro-LGBT organizations.

“The motion before the Court is not about whether DEI policies, however defined in a given context, are good public policy. Nor is it about whether specific DEI initiatives comply with antidiscrimination law,” Kelly wrote in his order. “Instead, it is about whether Plaintiffs have shown that they are entitled to a preliminary injunction prohibiting enforcement of the executive orders at issue.”

The judge said that the plaintiffs—National Urban League, National Fair Housing Alliance, and the AIDS Foundation of Chicago—are unlikely “to prevail on the merits” and that the “court will deny the motion.”

They’ve also failed to “show that they are likely to succeed on their due-process challenge to the provisions for which they likely have standing,” the judge said, adding that they haven’t “identified a protected property or liberty interest that these provisions threaten” or shown enough evidence to back claims about the Trump administration’s orders being arbitrarily enforced.

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The groups argued that that the president’s orders “will severely limit the organizations’ ability to provide critical social and health services such as HIV treatment, fair housing, equal employment opportunities, affordable credit, civil rights protections, and many others,” and would harm “people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, and people living with HIV,” the Lambda release said.

A statement from the White House on Trump’s order on DEI grants said that for the past 60 years, corporations, governments, law enforcement, and schools have increasingly used “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called” DEI programs, which the administration argued was in violation of civil rights laws.

The second moved to end “radical and wasteful” federal programs involving DEI and preferencing, which impacts “federal contractors who have provided DEI training or DEI training materials to agency or department employees.”

DEI policies are part of an organizational framework that its proponents say reduces discrimination on the basis of identity or disability and provides more representation to groups that some say have been subject to discrimination for their identities or disabilities.

DEI policies, which were rolled out rapidly across industries and the government after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, have come under fire in recent years, particularly from Republicans. A handful of major companies have started to or have already rolled back their DEI-related policies in recent months, including Walmart, Tractor Supply Co., John Deere, and McDonald’s.