Federal judge rolls back key #civil #rights protections in Louisiana’s ‘#sacrifice #zones’

The decision could open the door for other industry-friendly states to follow suit

James Cain, a federal judge in Louisiana who was appointed by president Trump,
decided to
block the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice from pursuing enforcement actions based on
“#disparate #impacts”
— or the idea that a regulation might disproportionately harm one group of people over another.

A provision of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 known as #TitleVI allows federal agencies to take action against state policies and programs that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

Since the EPA’s founding in 1970, however, the agency allowed most of the Title VI complaints that it received to languish without resolution.

In 2015, a coalition of community groups in Louisiana,
with the assistance of the public-interest environmental law organization #Earthjustice,
sued the agency for this practice and won.

Five years later, after president Biden took office,
federal regulators finally began addressing the civil rights complaints they received and
the EPA announced a civil-rights #probe into #Cancer #Alley
— a stretch of land on the lower Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where
over 150 chemical plants pump cancer-causing chemicals into the air of predominantly Black communities
— marking a new phase of the agency’s use of Title VI.

The federal government was making significant progress with Louisiana officials in their Title VI negotiations:

Cancer Alley residents’ principle demand
— that state regulators assess whether a community is already exposed to disproportionately high levels of pollution before permitting a new project there
— had made it into a draft resolution document.

️But at a certain point in the process, sources told Grist, the talks broke down.

Then in May 2023, #Jeff #Landry, then the attorney general (and now the #governor) of Louisiana,
filed a lawsuit against the EPA.

On the basis that the agency was overstepping its authority, Landry’s suit challenged not only the EPA’s use of Title VI to regulate pollution in Louisiana,
but also the very legal justification of "#disparate-#impacts" regulation, which reaches thousands of programs across the country
and can be used to adjudicate decisions as varied as where a new highway can go or whether a housing practice is discriminatory.

Advocates worried that the lawsuit had the potential to unravel decades of civil rights law.

Judge Cain’s final judgment concurs with Landry’s argument.

In effect, the ruling will make it impossible for the EPA to pursue enforcement actions based on disparate impacts
— but only in Louisiana.

Cain’s judgment comes in the same week as ️the EPA’s new Title VI guidance,
which urges state and local regulators to establish safeguards that protect their constituents against discrimination.
https://grist.org/equity/title-vi-epa-james-cain-louisiana/