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WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, America First Legal (AFL) filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), calling for an immediate investigation into the City of Chicago and the Chicago Police Department (CPD) for unlawful race-based discrimination. The letter exposes how Chicago has hardwired racial preferences into every level of city government, violating Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Chicago has turned its government into a full-scale race-based system, requiring departments — including the police department — to use race as a driving factor in hiring, promotion, training, and even core policing decisions. Chicago’s citywide racial preferences are masquerading as inclusive policies rooted in “equity” when they are really discriminatory policies that are in direct defiance of federal law.
Chicago established the Office of Equity and Racial Justice to mandate racial equity action plans across every agency, embedding race-conscious directives into all operations. Chicago built these policies in partnership with the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE), an activist, Soros-funded association that rejects colorblind government and trains governments to “normalize” racial decision-making at every stage of government.
Under this framework, the Chicago Police Department adopted a comprehensive Racial Equity Action Plan, committing to demographic hiring targets, race-focused recruitment and retention, mandatory “racial equity” and “implicit bias” training, and community policing strategies centered on racial impact assessments. The Chicago Police Department further entrenched these policies by creating a permanent Office of Equity and Engagement to enforce race-based directives across all personnel and public safety functions. As recipients of federal funds, both the city of Chicago and the Chicago Police Department are prohibited from engaging in race-based employment or program administration; yet, their own documents openly admit that they are doing precisely that.
These same equity-focused policies are embedded in cities across the country. AFL has uncovered similar discriminatory equity-focused policies in Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon, as well as Alexandria, Richmond, and Arlington, Virginia. AFL has referred its findings regarding all these local governments to the Department of Justice to take all appropriate actions, such as withholding federal funds from the jurisdictions that engage in discriminatory practices. AFL will continue to fight against discriminatory policies that jeopardize critical city functions, including police departments, whose core function is to maintain the peace and protect Americans without considering their race.
“Chicago is running an explicitly race-based government, and it’s using federal dollars to do it,” said Gene Hamilton, President of America First Legal. “No city is above the law. The DOJ must act now to stop Chicago’s unlawful racial engineering and restore the guarantees of equal treatment that the Civil Rights Act demands.”
“Cities have a legal duty to treat residents equally, without regard to their race or sex,” said Alice Kass, attorney at America First Legal. “Major cities around the country have explicitly committed to the opposite: discriminatory policies to achieve some sort of preferred racial outcome. This is not only unlawful, but also dangerous. Police departments should be committed to protecting Americans, not achieving citywide equity benchmarks.”
AFL will continue fighting to expose and dismantle unlawful race-based policies wherever they appear. We will continue to press federal agencies to enforce the law without fear or favor. And we remain unwavering in our commitment to defending equal protection, equal justice, and equal opportunity for every American.
Read the full letter here.
Learn more about AFL’s fight against DEI here.
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