President Donald Trump has struck a different tone, suggesting that some of these workers "don't deserve" back pay and seizing the opportunity to fire others, particularly those who staff and run what he has called "Democrat agencies." One of these agencies is the Department of Education, whose Office for Civil Rights enforces laws such as Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act-which bars discrimination based on race, color, and national origin-in federally funded schools and colleges.
In June, in an escalation of the Trump administration's pressure on Harvard University to bow to its demands, a federal Office for Civil Rights announced that the institution was violating federal law. The office released a nearly 60-page report accusing Harvard of "deliberate indifference" to ongoing discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students, which is illegal under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
difficult to conclude anything other than that [the Trump administration] used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country's premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of [federal law].
