On Tuesday, the federal government submitted a motion to intervene in an ongoing civil rights suit in order to halt the nation’s first reparations program, which provides Black residents of Evanston, Illinois, with payments tied to past race-based housing discrimination.
The intervention complaint filed on June 16 by the U.S. Department of Justice asserts that Evanston’s housing reparations initiative, which disperses $25,000 in cash along with assistance for purchasing, renovating, or maintaining housing in Evanston, is “exclusively” available to current or former Black residents who lived in the city as adults between 1919 and 1969, and to their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and is therefore a “racially discriminatory program.”
Justice Department Claims Race-Based Housing Payments Violate the Constitution
Similar to the six non-Black plaintiffs represented by Judicial Watch in a federal lawsuit against the city in 2024, the DOJ contends that the program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The department argues that individuals of other racial backgrounds who lived in Evanston during that era and may have suffered unlawful housing discrimination are not eligible for any payments or financial assistance, nor are their descendants.
Citing the Supreme Court’s recent voting rights ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the federal filing maintains that the Constitution “almost never permits [a government] to discriminate on the basis of race. Such discrimination triggers scrutiny,” and that such “race-based government actions are ‘rare for a reason.’”
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Federal Investigation Adds New Pressure to Evanston Reparations Case
The Justice Department argues that the reparations program, which to date has distributed more than $7 million in cash and housing assistance to hundreds of Black families who consider Evanston their primary home (funded by proceeds from a local tax on legal marijuana sales), also runs afoul of the federal Fair Housing Act.
The plaintiffs contend that the reparations program fails to address particular instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or federal law.
DOJ lawyers also contend that the city resolutions creating the program in 2021 rely on boilerplate language that “acknowledge[s] the harm caused to Black/African American Evanston residents due to discriminatory housing policies and practices and inactions on the part of the City.” Yet the program does not require applicants to demonstrate that they or their ancestors personally experienced discrimination.
“There are sensible ways for a city to repair harms from the past or to target resources to its most vulnerable residents and neighborhoods,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division in a statement. “Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the solution. It amounts to race discrimination, plain and simple. And it is illegal.”
U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros added, “Distributing public funds based on an individual’s ancestry or race divides the citizenry and recreates the very hierarchy the Equal Protection Clause was crafted to dismantle.”
City Vows to Defend Groundbreaking Reparations Program in Court
Robin Rue Simmons, a former Evanston alderperson who championed the city’s reparations process and now chairs its reparations committee, characterized the Justice Department’s lawsuit in a recent Evanston RoundTable opinion piece as “a legal maneuver” that is “not a challenge to one small city, but a direct attempt to roll back the broader and growing movement for reparative justice” and “to establish a chilling precedent. … It is an attempt to divide us through fear.”
She noted that Evanston’s program was specifically crafted to address municipal harms caused by the City’s own exclusionary zoning, which denied Black residents opportunities to build wealth and stability.
According to the U.S. Census, about 14 percent of Evanston’s roughly 76,000 residents are Black, with 11 percent identifying as multi-racial, AP News reported. A majority of Evanston’s Black residents reside in the city’s historically low-income Fifth and Second Wards, based on a 2024 study of the reparations program.
Rue Simmons pointed out that five states and hundreds of other U.S. cities are now pursuing reparations through commissions, legislation, harm reports, direct-benefit programs, and community-led processes, and stated, “When governments cause harm, they have an obligation to repair it.”
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois denied the city’s motion to dismiss the original class action suit in March 2026. That same month, the Trump administration opened an investigation into the program, and now says the city has withheld documents and information requested in that probe, prompting its decision to intervene this week.
Evanston Maintains That the Reparations Program Is Legal and Constitutional
The lawsuit filed by six plaintiffs in May 2024 seeks monetary compensation for all residents who were denied the opportunity to participate in the city’s housing program, which has allocated up to $20 million in funds exclusively for Black applicants. The six non-Black residents also request that the Court either stop the program or modify its eligibility rules.
Evanston’s response to the original complaint, filed May 8, states that the reparations program adopted by the Evanston City Council “is a legal and targeted remedial measure designed to address historical housing discrimination” by offering $25,000 housing grants “to Evanston residents who either experienced the acknowledged discrimination directly,” were direct descendants of those who did, or were individuals who endured other housing discrimination resulting from Evanston’s post-1969 policies and practices.
The city also asserted that the plaintiffs’ lawsuit was filed too late, more than two years after the end of a two-year statute of limitations starting when the Evanston Restorative Housing Program’s application period closed on November 5, 2021.
Evanston Mayor Daniel Bliss said the city was reviewing the DOJ filing and that “We stand behind our pioneering reparations program, are confident in its constitutionality, and look forward to defending it in court.”
