A federal judge in Louisiana has issued a permanent injunction barring the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) from enforcing disparate-impact requirements under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act within the state.
The Aug. 22
ruling, handed down by U.S. District Judge James Cain, in the Western District of Louisiana, makes permanent the
preliminary injunction he issued on Jan. 23, blocking the EPA and DOJ from enforcing any regulations issued under Title VI that require recipients of federal funding, such as state agencies, to prove that the projects they approve are not discriminatory.
Advocates who pressured EPA to enforce the regulations, such as Earthjustice, have argued that disparate impacts targeted by Title VI rules include unintentional and cumulative environmental harms in places like southern Louisiana, where
they say minority communities have been disproportionately affected by environmental hazards such as pollution.
“Louisiana has given industrial polluters open license to poison Black and brown communities for generations, only to now have one court give it a permanent free pass to abandon its responsibilities,” Earthjustice Vice President for Healthy Communities Patrice Simms, said in a statement. “Louisiana’s residents, its environmental justice communities, deserve the same Title VI protections as the rest of the nation.”
Louisiana in its lawsuit against the agency
argued that the EPA was exceeding its authority and misusing the Title VI disparate-impact rules because the law prohibits only intentional discrimination. It contends that enforcement of the disparate-impact rules forces Louisiana to engage in race-based decision-making, which is unconstitutional. Further, the state argued that the EPA’s approach imposes additional, unwarranted burdens on the state by requiring it to consider factors outside of the statutory environmental standards, such as racial demographics, which it says is not required by law and violates the principles of cooperative federalism.
“Activities that would be perfectly lawful under environmental law are thus now threatened because EPA believes those activities occur proximate to the ‘wrong’ racial groups,” then Attorney General Jeff Landry wrote in the original May 24, 2023, complaint. “EPA does not bother to deny that it would be unconcerned if the exact same emissions occurred in areas with differing racial demographics. But EPA has nonetheless arrogated to itself the authority to decide whether otherwise-lawful emissions are affecting the ‘right’ racial groups.”
Asked for comment on the ruling, an EPA spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that both the Justice Department and EPA “remain committed to enforcing civil rights law, consistent with the court’s order.”
There are dozens of pending Title VI cases across numerous states. In April, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody led a 23-state coalition
demanding revisions to EPA’s Title VI disparate impact rules,
arguing that the agency’s approach goes beyond the original intent of the Civil Rights Act and promotes “race-conscious environmental justice initiatives” that force states to unconstitutionally discriminate against their own citizens.
“In practice, ‘environmental justice’ asks the States to engage in racial engineering in deciding whether to, for example, issue environmental permits, rather than relying on the effect on the environment and other appropriate factors,” Moody wrote in the petition.
On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed Executive Order
13990, which laid the groundwork for integrating environmental justice into federal agency missions.
Later, he signed Executive Order
14008, which led to the establishment of the
White House Environmental Justice Interagency Council and the
Justice40 whole-of-government initiative, which set the goal that 40 percent of the overall benefits of federal investments in climate and clean energy should flow to “disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.”
