On February 17, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division announced the dismissal of a 60-year-old desegregation case in Tennessee’s Dyersburg City Schools, continuing the Trump administration’s efforts to end school desegregation orders. A DOJ press release said that the school district “no longer operates as a segregated system,” and U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said the school district had complied “in good faith” and that “the federal government has no legitimate reason to continue monitoring.”
The case originated from a 1966 federal complaint against the Dyersburg Board of Education that challenged racially segregated public education in light of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Many similar federal court orders forced schools to desegregate after Southern states initially resisted school integration as required by Brown v. Board of Education.
In addition to the Tennessee case, the administration has in the past year ended desegregation orders in other states including Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana despite studies showing that racial segregation in schools has actually increased since the late 1980s.
Ironically, the following day the DOJ joined a race discrimination lawsuit against Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and launched Title IX probes in three Michigan school districts over sexual orientation and gender ideology. According to K-12 Dive, in its intervention in the LAUSD lawsuit, which challenges a school district integration plan, the DOJ said the school system is “operating a system of racial spoils” and that its desegregation program has “outlived its usefulness to the point of being unconstitutional.”
The DOJ’s string of announcements invoked civil rights laws and protections for White and cisgender students. The LAUSD lawsuit joined by the DOJ was originally filed In January 2026 by the 1776 Project Foundation, a conservative nonprofit focused on public education.
For more from K-12 Dive on dismissals click here.
For more from K-12 Dive on actions against integration programs click here.