Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

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.”

A $6 million gift from Bob and Colleen Haas will establish the Thelton E. Henderson ’62 Chair in Civil Rights Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

“It’s unnecessary to do what the administration is doing now, unless one is operating like a mob boss,” said UC Berkeley Law’s Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy, Catherine E. Lhamon.

“What we see now is an Office for Civil Rights that is not neutral,” says UC Berkeley Law’s Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy and former OCR head, Catherine E. Lhamon, “that is not there for every student, and that is picking and choosing both which laws that it’s interested in and which students’ rights it’s interested to protect.”