Plaquemines Parish is in a similar position. Pursuant to a contract with the Louisiana Department of Health, environmental engineers performed an assessment and sampling of water sources used for consumption at Phoenix High School, the school that is 94 percent Black. The engineers set out to determine the concentration of lead in the water, and published their findings in a June 2022 report. For reference, the Environmental Protection Agency’s “action level” for lead in drinking water—above which water systems replace lead service lines and notify the public of the risks of lead in drinking water—is 15 parts per billion (ppb). Yet at Phoenix High, the lead level of the water from a cafeteria sink faucet used for handwashing was 20.2 ppb. The lead level of the water from a kitchen fixture used for filling pots was 36.1 ppb. And the lead level of the water from a faucet used for handwashing in the kitchen and serving area was 412 ppb.

The court orders to which the Plaquemines Parish School Board was subject before last week required it to repair dilapidated schools attended by Black students, and to report on present or proposed construction of facilities. These obligations could have been helpful to any Phoenix High families trying to protect their kids from lead poisoning. But because of Trump’s Justice Department, that tool is no longer available.

In the DOJ’s press release, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said that Plaquemines Parish School Board will no longer have to “devote precious local resources over an integration issue that ended two generations ago.” But racism in Plaquemines Parish did not stop in 1975. In 1978, for instance, TIME magazine reported that the parish still had separate waiting rooms in public hospitals, separate mobile libraries for children, and separate hurricane evacuation plans. In 1986, the Associated Press reported that all 485 students at Phoenix High School stayed home on January 20 in protest of the board’s refusal to recognize Martin Luther King Day as a holiday. In 1966, a pro-segregation politician transferred ownership of eight schools and the land they were on to the parish and forced the school system to lease the buildings, thus depriving it of critical funds for Black students. The school system did not get the property back until 1999. 

School segregation is a modern-day problem. It both creates and entrenches barriers to educational opportunities, economic mobility, and broader societal equality. The Department of Justice once sought desegregation orders in order to surmount those barriers. Trump’s Justice Department is creating more obstacles instead.