Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

Catherine Lhamon, the executive director of the UC Berkeley Edley Center on Law and Democracy, said the Brandeis Center and StandWithUs lawsuit appears to express a vote of “no confidence” in California’s recent legislative efforts to address antisemitism at schools.

“If you don’t have a system of checks to encourage or require employers to examine their procedures and to question their decisions when their decisions appear to be biased then you will have more and more discrimination and fewer and fewer opportunities for women, people of color, people with disabilities, people who are negatively stereotyped,” said Professor David Oppenheimer.

“The job of the Office for Civil Rights is to protect all people,” said Catherine Lhamon, who served as assistant secretary of education for civil rights during the Biden administration and now works at UC Berkeley Law School. “This administration is picking and choosing who it will protect.”

“The Trump administration has chosen a small handful of issues that it is interested in enforcing through civil rights, and it’s noisy about those and noisy about its disdain for everything else,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led OCR under the Obama and Biden administrations. “And that is unprecedented and dangerous and illegal.”

Thelton Henderson, as an attorney in the Department of Justice, was a witness to that segregated era in the Old South. Now, as a retired federal judge and a visiting professor at UC Berkeley Law, Henderson warns that powerful American forces are working again to restrict voting by people of color and by economically disadvantaged people.

“You have to be able to identify officers so you can vindicate your constitutional rights when they’re violated,” said Professor Catherine Crump. “And to the extent, this is yet another step ICE agents are taking to conceal their identities and avoid accountability.”

“By opening investigations with accusatory quotations from department officials and their allies, the Trump administration is putting its thumb on the scale,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, UC Berkeley Law’s Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy.

“Historically, over decades, families have been able to come to the federal government and get relief without hiring an attorney,” Catherine E. Lhamon, UC Berkeley Law’s Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy told USA TODAY. “These cuts ensure that no family can rely on that.”

“OCR could not afford any cuts, period, and needed desperately to add staff because of the quantum of harm in schools with respect to civil rights and the many, many thousands of cases coming into the office,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, UC Berkeley Law’s Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy. “Nothing has changed about that.”

“We don’t live under a king in this country. We don’t give unilateral authority to the President to make decisions about every walk of life for all Americans,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, UC Berkeley Law’s Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy. “This President is operating as if we do.”