Evanston reparations program violates Constitution, DOJ says in lawsuit intervention

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division moved to intervene in a lawsuit challenging Evanston, Illinois’s reparations program, alleging the city’s practice of distributing cash payments and housing assistance exclusively to Black residents violates the Constitution and federal fair housing law.

The department’s proposed complaint in intervention contends that the city’s Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fair Housing Act.

“Under the pretext of paying reparations for events more than 100 years ago, the City of Evanston has chosen to distribute millions of dollars in cash and housing benefits to people because of the color of their skin or the color of the skin of their parents, grandparents, or great grandparents,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “It is race discrimination, pure and simple. And it is illegal.”

U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros for the Northern District of Illinois said the Constitution requires the government to treat citizens as individuals rather than members of a racial class.

“Distributing public funds based on an individual’s ancestry or race divides the citizenry and establishes the very hierarchy the Equal Protection Clause was designed to dismantle,” Boutros said.

Evanston adopted the reparations program in 2019. Under its terms, Black persons who lived in the city as adults at any point between 1919 and 1969 — as well as their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren — are eligible to receive $25,000 in the form of cash payments or financial assistance for purchasing, repairing or maintaining a primary residence in the city.

The Justice Department said the city has not identified any specific acts of discrimination that the payments are intended to remedy, nor does it require recipients to show that they or their ancestors experienced discrimination while living in Evanston. Race alone determines eligibility, according to the department. The city has paid out more than $5 million to date and plans to distribute millions more as additional funds become available.

The federal intervention follows a private lawsuit filed in 2024 by descendants of Evanston residents who lived in the city during the same 1919–1969 window but are not Black. The plaintiffs in Flinn, et al. v. City of Evanston challenged their exclusion from the program as an equal protection violation. A federal judge denied Evanston’s motion to dismiss the case in March 2026.

The Justice Department opened its own investigation of the program that same month under the Equal Protection Clause and the Fair Housing Act, but the city refused to cooperate, according to the department. The United States now seeks to intervene in the lawsuit.