Evanston, Illinois has been operating the first municipally funded reparations program in American history. On June 17th, the Department of Justice joined the lawsuit seeking to end it.
The Civil Rights Division's argument is straightforward: distributing $25,000 checks based on the color of someone's skin — or the color of their parents', grandparents', or great-grandparents' skin — violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fair Housing Act. That is not a close constitutional call.
The program was established by the Evanston city council in 2019 and passed in March 2021. It is funded by a three-percent municipal tax on legal marijuana sales — a funding mechanism the program's designers described as deliberate. Black residents made up 16 percent of Evanston's population between 2017 and 2019 while accounting for 70 percent of the city's marijuana arrests. The elegance of that symmetry doesn't resolve the constitutional problem with the execution.
The program distributes $25,000 — in cash or housing assistance — to Black residents who lived in Evanston as adults at any point between 1919 and 1969, when the city banned housing discrimination, and to their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The rationale is Evanston's role in redlining and housing exclusion during that fifty-year period. By the DOJ's accounting, the city has already distributed approximately $3.5 million to at least 141 applicants.
The DOJ gave Evanston an opportunity to address this without federal litigation. The city received a civil rights investigation notice from the Justice Department in March. It declined to cooperate. The intervention in Judicial Watch's existing lawsuit — which Judicial Watch originally filed in May 2024 — followed.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who heads the Civil Rights Division, didn't use diplomatic language. "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." She continued: "There are sound ways for a city to remedy past discrimination or direct resources to its most vulnerable citizens and neighborhoods. Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer. It is race discrimination, pure and simple. And it is illegal."
The constitutional argument is not subtle. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 to guarantee equal protection under the law — a guarantee that does not include an exception for programs whose designers believe their intentions are good. Courts have been consistent on this point. Evanston's city council either didn't know that or decided to test it.
There is evidence someone in Evanston suspected the original design wouldn't survive scrutiny. When questions arose about distributing benefits exclusively by race, the city expanded eligibility to include any racial group that could claim discrimination from city policies after 1969. The DOJ's intervention challenges the program regardless of that modification.
Evanston was not operating in isolation. It was the model — the city other municipalities pointed to when arguing that local reparations programs were legally viable. California assembled a task force. Other cities floated similar frameworks. Evanston was the proof of concept, and other cities were watching to see whether it held.
A Judicial Watch lawsuit is a legal challenge. A Judicial Watch lawsuit with the United States Department of Justice intervening on the constitutional claim is a federal enforcement action. Every city that has been watching Evanston to gauge what's permissible is now watching something different: whether the Equal Protection Clause means what it says.
The irony is structural. The Fourteenth Amendment was written after the Civil War specifically to prevent government from treating people differently based on race. Using it to challenge a program that claims to address the legacy of slavery isn't a contradiction. It's the amendment doing precisely what it was designed to do.
