HOUSTON — The US Department of Justice has withdrawn from an agreement with the city of Houston Reducing illegal dumping in black and Latino neighborhoods, as part of the Trump administration’s broad dismantling of environmental justice initiatives.
Federal authorities quietly ended the surveillance this year I pulled the plug on a similar settlement about wastewater problems in rural Alabama, according to three former law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the move had not been announced.
Without federal oversight, advocates in Houston said city officials have become less responsive to residents affected by ongoing littering in the historically black Trinity/Gardens Houston neighborhood.
“We have nothing to fight anymore,” Huey resident German Wilson, who has spent years drawing attention to the problem, told The Associated Press during a tour of illegal dumping hotspots. “We got a watered-down EPA agreement. We received no help from the Department of Justice. The city has no reason to respond to us, and we find that they are really ignoring us.”
Justice Department and Houston officials did not respond to requests for comment.
A Department of Justice investigation in 2023 found that the Houston neighborhood in question have been flooded Through the illegal dumping of garbage, medical waste, mattresses and even corpses and “rotting corpses” – a description local officials insisted was exaggerated.
The settlement with the city called for three years of federal monitoring, public data reporting requirements and community outreach to affected neighborhoods.
Former Mayor Sylvester Turner, a Democrat He died this year After winning a seat in the US House of Representatives, he called the Justice Department’s investigation “ridiculous, baseless and baseless”, although his administration later agreed to federal surveillance. The city has previously cited its efforts to combat illegal dumping through One Clean Houston, a multi-million-dollar cleanup and enforcement initiative.
The cancellation of the settlement, which was scheduled to expire in June 2026, came as the Trump administration directed federal agencies to… Eliminate jobs and programs dedicated to environmental justice. This came in the wake of President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order to stop this Diversity, equity and inclusion Programs across the US government.
“The Department of Justice will no longer advance ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through the distorted lens of DEI,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in April when the Justice Department announced it had ended an agreement with Alabama over Lowndes County’s ongoing wastewater issues. “President Trump has made clear: Americans deserve a government committed to serving every individual with dignity and respect, and spending taxpayer resources consistent with the national interest, not arbitrary standards.”
Lowndes County is a high-poverty area between Selma and Montgomery where there is a type of soil that makes it difficult for conventional septic tanks to function. A federal investigation found that the majority black community had long been so Exposed to raw sewage It lacked basic sanitation services as officials engaged in a pattern of inaction and neglect.
The Alabama agreement requires the state to develop a plan to improve public health and infrastructure and to stop prosecuting residents who lack the resources to install or repair sewer systems. It was the result of the Department of Justice’s first environmental justice investigation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits recipients of federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin in their federally funded programs and activities.
In Houston, illegal dumping has been a hot-button issue for many years. It came to the attention of the Justice Department after Lone Star Legal Aid, a nonprofit law firm that advocates for low-income residents, filed a complaint about the city’s significantly delayed response times for small moves in black and Latino neighborhoods compared to white communities.
During the first year of federal monitoring, the city was able to detect illegal dumping much faster, rolled out new vehicles and added workers, said German Wilson, president of Trinity/Houston Gardens Super Neighborhood, a community group.
“We could email everyone, and they would listen very intently to see what they could do differently,” she said.
This year, the city has received thousands of complaints about illegal dumping, according to data it posts online, a backlog that was on display last week when an AP reporter walked past piles of trash and debris, including mattresses, construction waste, a toilet, mulch, wooden pieces of a fence and a car bumper. Some of the piles started out as long, loose leaves and tree branches.
“We also found animals lying in the middle of all this,” German Wilson said. “It never ends.”
Other environmental justice advocates said ending the Alabama and Houston settlements was short-sighted.
“What I find appalling about this administration’s position is that these people did not go out into the community to see how people were affected,” said Katherine Coleman Flowers, the activist who filed the civil rights complaint that led to the investigation in Alabama.
“The message they’re sending is that they don’t really understand what they’re doing. There are Americans across the board struggling with these issues.”
___Mustan reported from New York.