Donald Trump is leading the most openly pro-segregation administration in recent American history, and it advanced that agenda this week when it killed yet another school desegregation agreement with a Louisiana parish.
The Associated Press reported Thursday that the Trump administration got a George W. Bush-appointed judge to lift another decades-old anti-segregation consent decree in the Bayou State.
A federal judge on Monday approved a joint motion from Louisiana and the U.S. Justice Department to dismiss a 1967 lawsuit in DeSoto Parish schools, a district of about 5,000 students in the state’s northwest. It’s the second such dismissal since the Justice Department began working to overturn desegregation cases it once championed. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill thanked President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday for ‘helping us to finally end some of these cases.’
The AP quoted Murrill saying, “DeSoto Parish has its school system back,” and that “for the last 10 years, there have been no disputes among the parties, yet the consent decree remained.”
Of course, the absence of disputes under a consent decree is not exactly proof that the consent decree is no longer needed. To borrow an analogy from the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent from Shelby County, to throw out a consent decree because there’s been no resegregation or discrimination “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
This follows the administration in February removing language that banned federal contractors from operating segregated facilities, and its decision last spring to quash a different consent decree with Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish.
Decrees like the one being lifted existed to deter discriminatory behavior. The decree in question was only put in place because the federal government determined DeSoto Parish schools were engaged in racist school segregation more than a decade after the practice had been prohibited by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. And unsurprisingly, the Trump administration presented no evidence that the crisis of school segregation has been eradicated (now or into the future) in DeSoto or Plaquemines parishes, or anywhere else it’s looking to reverse school desegregation measures. As the Associated Press noted last summer, Trump’s Justice Department seems to be on a mission to reverse school desegregation efforts all across the country — an effort that’s being fought by civil rights activists and parents who testify to the scourge of school segregation in the regions where they live. If the president’s frequent racist outbursts and public objections to any discussion of racism hadn’t already made it obvious, actions like his administration’s attack on desegregation reflect the priorities of a Jim Crow-style regime that’s intent on rolling back racial equality.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
