Education civil rights investigations decline to roughly one-third of 2024 pace

Sexual violence complaints draw 29 investigations and one finding of fault

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened roughly one-third as many school and college investigations per month under the second Trump administration as it did in 2024, according to internal case data obtained by ProPublica through litigation. The records, covering the first 18 months of the administration, show an average of about 100 new investigations per month while complaints continued to arrive in high volume.

The Office for Civil Rights launched 1,839 investigations from Inauguration Day 2025 through July 29, 2026 — about 100 per month on average, compared with 310 per month during 2024 under President Joe Biden, according to data ProPublica previously obtained. The database also reflects 24,000 new complaints logged through May and nearly 17,000 new and old cases closed, almost always by dismissing them. The records show OCR dismissed complaints more frequently than in prior years, and fewer than 700 cases opened by the administration were resolved with a finding of wrongdoing.

Under President Donald Trump, OCR abandoned the public-facing list of schools it was investigating and the reasons for those investigations, including claims of discrimination based on race, sex and disability. ProPublica sued the department to obtain internal case data. The government subsequently provided records covering the agency’s first 18 months of Trump’s return to power, and ProPublica published the data so the public could search the cases.

The searchable table includes investigations into alleged discrimination at schools and colleges, complaints dismissed without investigation and complaints filed during the Trump administration that OCR had not yet decided to investigate. OCR uses “case opened” to record when complaints were received and “investigation start date” to indicate when it initiated an investigation. With the online database idle since Trump took office, information about investigations had otherwise come through selective department press releases, internal data provided by OCR employees to reporters and acknowledgments from schools and colleges that said they had become targets. The records obtained through ProPublica’s lawsuit fill that gap for more than 1,800 investigations initiated from Jan. 20, 2025, through July 29, 2026.

More than 200 new complaints were filed with OCR about schools’ handling of sexual violence — rape, assault and abuse — but the Trump administration opened investigations in only 29, finding fault with a school district once. It is typical for the office to open at least 60 sexual violence investigations each year. The department addressed fewer of these cases despite continued concerns about the persistence of the problem, which ProPublica illustrated with intense public scrutiny over how Cornell University addressed a student’s report of a 2024 gang rape.

Beyond that, OCR opened only two investigations into discrimination based on sexual orientation during the period examined. Shiwali Patel, an attorney who previously worked at the OCR and is now with the National Women’s Law Center, said, “They’re barely doing anything to protect women and girls, including survivors of sexual violence.” He added, “They just don’t care about women and girls.”

The National Women’s Law Center and more than 120 other advocacy, civil-rights and education groups sent a letter on Tuesday to Congress’ ranking education committee leaders urging them to hold OCR accountable for “its failure to enforce civil rights law and protect students from sexual violence.”

ProPublica’s analysis found that the office placed a new emphasis on complaints that men faced discrimination. OCR launched 172 investigations into alleged “discrimination against males,” compared with 104 cases of alleged “discrimination against females” during the period examined. One case involved a 2023 complaint against Skyline College in California alleging that the community college discriminated against men by listing scholarships on its website that were exclusively for women and by promoting a program for women. According to university records, the Biden administration had not acted on that specific complaint. OCR opened the investigation in mid-April, and two weeks later Skyline College agreed to remove the scholarships from its website and add language that the program was open to all students. A Skyline College spokesperson did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

At the same time, OCR opened fewer than 370 new investigations involving racial discrimination even though about 5,000 complaints were filed. About 11% of those investigations involved allegations of discrimination against white students. Over the summer, the department announced investigations into five medical schools’ admissions policies. Johnathan Smith, managing director of education at the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law, said, “They are not allocating their resources to racial discrimination complaints, to sexual assault complaints, to the types of complaints that really often speak to systematic discrimination and problems.” The National Center for Youth Law has also sued the Education Department for similar information; that lawsuit is pending.

In the early months of Trump’s second term, Education Secretary Linda McMahon fired hundreds of department employees and closed seven regional OCR offices. The remaining civil-rights staff have described untenable caseloads and pressure to dismiss complaints.

Rachel Gittleman, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents OCR staff, said the remaining attorneys “are navigating pure chaos.” She said, “They are being asked to use the tools they have used for their entire careers not for good, not to protect students, but to harm students. You see it in the case dismissals, the cases that target trans students or people of color.”

In response to questions from ProPublica, Education Department spokesperson Sabin Sidney blamed the Biden administration for leaving the office with 19,000 unresolved cases, which he said the Trump administration had worked to address. “Spare us the crocodile tears as the Trump Administration is working to restore OCR to its original purpose: enforcing the law to ensure all students can receive an education free from discrimination,” Sidney wrote. He said the administration “treats any form of discrimination on the basis of race or sex as illegal” and criticized the prior administration for endorsing policies that allowed transgender girls and women to compete in women’s athletics and use women’s restrooms.

The disclosure comes as the administration moves forward with efforts to shut down the Education Department and place OCR under the Department of Justice. Disability-rights advocates and others have criticized the move, while the administration says it will lead to more efficiency and better protect students’ rights. The majority of cases before OCR involve students with disabilities, as has historically been the case.

The data does not include investigations opened before Trump retook power that remain pending decisions by OCR — a backlog of more than 10,000 cases.

ProPublica received two Education Department data files. One contained OCR cases initiated through a complaint or with a resolution from Jan. 20, 2025, through July 2026; the other listed investigation notices sent to institutions from Jan. 20, 2025, through April 9, 2026. Most Trump administration investigations started with a complaint, but internally initiated investigations appeared only in the latter file, so ProPublica’s tallies do not include internally initiated cases after April 9. The files use different issue descriptions for some of the same cases, and ProPublica used descriptions from both: “sexual violence” appeared only in the complaint file’s descriptions, while “discrimination against males” appeared only in the investigation notices file. Joel Jacobs contributed data reporting.