It really doesn’t take long for the Trump administration to demonstrate that it is a white nationalist organization only interested in protecting the civil rights of perpetually aggrieved MAGA Caucasians who don’t need protecting.
Just one day after it was announced that the Department of Justice approved a nearly $5 million settlement for the family of Ashli Babbitt—the Jan. 6 Capitol rioter who got herself shot and killed by a Capitol police officer while climbing over a barricade inside the Capitol building—that very same Justice Department moved to drop Biden-era police-accountability agreements with Minneapolis and Louisville that were prompted by the murder of George Floyd and the killing (that should have been ruled a murder) of Breonna Taylor.
According to The Washington Post, Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the DOJ’s civil rights division, will also close investigations into local police departments in Phoenix, Memphis, Oklahoma City and other cities that were launched under President Joe Biden, and overturn rulings that those departments had violated the Constitution.
“I was not confident that the Justice Department could stand up and justify these in court,” Dhillon said of the consent decrees with Minneapolis and Louisville, claiming without further elaboration (and likely without evidence) that those agreements were “reliant on faulty legal theories.”
This is why the department’s Civil Rights Division saw a mass exodus of more than 100 attorneys last month. The attorneys resigned because the department, under Trump, has decided to focus on conservative causes like the largely fictional civil rights violations of white people, and steer away from (or outright gut) cases involving civil rights protections for Black people, people of color, and other marginalized groups.
It’s almost as if police reform is a thing this administration wants nothing to do with unless a domestic terrorist who tried to overthrow the government to forcibly overturn the results of a free and fair election gets themselves killed by an officer while doing a thing that is likely to get one killed by an officer.
Ashi Babbitt’s story results in millions of taxpayer dollars going towards settling a case, while the deaths of Floyd, Taylor, and countless other victims of police brutality get swept under a white supremacist rug.
Of course, leaders in Minneapolis and Louisville have vowed to follow through with the police-accountability agreements achieved under Biden regardless of the Trump administration’s decision.
“We will comply with every sentence, of every paragraph, of the 169-page consent decree that we signed this year,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said at a news briefing, according to the Post.
Hmmm. We’ll see.
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