DOJ Returns to Court: Trump Violated 1975 Discrimination Settlement

Just three years after settling the landmark housing discrimination case with a court-supervised consent decree, the Department of Justice returned to federal court with new allegations: the Trump Organization had violated the settlement terms and continued systematic discrimination against Black rental applicants. A DOJ attorney wrote to Roy Cohn in 1978 stating bluntly, “We believe that an underlying pattern of discrimination continues to exist in the Trump Management organization.”

Evidence of Continued Discrimination

The Justice Department marshaled extensive documentation showing that Trump properties continued rejecting Black applicants while accepting white applicants for identical apartments. Housing rights groups that had monitored Trump properties since the 1975 settlement documented numerous instances of Black families being denied apartments that were subsequently rented to white applicants.

The DOJ also identified a troubling pattern of racial steering: while more Black families were now renting in Trump-owned buildings than before the settlement, they had been systematically confined to a small number of complexes in less desirable locations. Tenants in these predominantly Black buildings reported deteriorating conditions including falling plaster, rusty light fixtures, and in one shocking case, bloodstained floors—conditions notably absent from Trump properties housing primarily white tenants.

Defying Court Oversight

The violations were particularly egregious because they occurred during the two-year monitoring period mandated by the consent decree. Trump Management had been required to provide weekly vacancy reports to the New York Urban League and submit demographic data to federal monitors—oversight mechanisms specifically designed to prevent exactly this type of continued discrimination.

The fact that discrimination persisted despite active court supervision suggested that the 1975 settlement had failed to change the fundamental culture within Trump’s organization. Rather than using the settlement as an opportunity to reform discriminatory practices, Trump Management appeared to have simply sought more sophisticated methods of achieving the same discriminatory goals while technically complying with reporting requirements.

Significance

This second DOJ action demonstrated a pattern that would define Trump’s relationship with legal accountability: when caught violating laws or agreements, he would settle without admitting wrongdoing, then continue the prohibited behavior in modified form. The 1978 lawsuit revealed that the “no admission of guilt” settlement in 1975 had been essentially meaningless—Trump had learned only to be more careful about documentation, not to abandon discrimination.

The case dragged on for four more years, finally closing in 1982 without a clear resolution. By that point, Trump had spent nearly a decade fighting civil rights enforcement, establishing both his willingness to defy court oversight and his ability to use prolonged litigation to avoid meaningful accountability. The lesson Trump learned was not about following the law, but about the effectiveness of delay, denial, and legal exhaustion as strategies for defeating civil rights enforcement.

Housing rights advocates would later point to this case as a textbook example of why consent decrees without admissions of liability often fail to change discriminatory behavior, particularly when dealing with defendants wealthy enough to afford prolonged legal battles and sophisticated enough to hide discrimination behind procedural compliance.