DREDF Response to Senate HELP Committee Report: Justice Denied: How Trump’s Office for Civil Rights Reached a 12-Year Low in Protecting Students from Discrimination
When a disabled child is physically restrained at school — held down, locked in a room — and the family files a federal civil rights complaint, they are not asking for a favor. They are invoking a legal right that Congress enacted and that the federal government is obligated to enforce. Senator Sanders’ report, released today, confirms that in 2025, the Trump administration looked at those families and did nothing. Zero resolution agreements involving seclusion or restraint. Zero. The federal civil rights enforcement apparatus for disabled students did not merely slow down. It stopped.
The numbers in this report represent disabled children: those physically restrained or placed in seclusion, those denied services required by their Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), and those whose families turned to the federal government for help and received none. Disabled students account for the largest share of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) complaints, and in 2025, OCR reached nearly 79% fewer resolution agreements on their behalf. They were failed.
This is what the gutting of OCR looks like in practice. The administration attempted to lay off nearly half of OCR’s workforce and sidelined civil rights investigators for months. Confronted with nearly 12,000 pending cases, OCR secured relief through resolution agreements in just 1% of them. At the same time, roughly 90% of new discrimination complaints, including disability complaints, were dismissed without review.
For families of disabled children, OCR has historically been the enforcement mechanism of last resort. When a school district refuses to provide appropriate services, when a child is subjected to illegal restraint, or when a student is excluded from the classroom, OCR is where families turn when everything else has failed. Congress created OCR because it decided, decades ago, that the federal government bears an affirmative obligation to protect every student’s civil rights. That obligation has been abandoned.
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) do not expire when a new administration takes office. The rights of disabled students are not contingent on political preference. The legal obligations these statutes create are real, enforceable, and, until this administration, enforced. What we are witnessing is not a shift in enforcement priorities but the deliberate collapse of the enforcement infrastructure itself. And when equal education rights are not enforced, we are relegated to a future of further poverty and unemployment.
DREDF calls on Congress to restore full funding and staffing to OCR, reopen all closed regional offices, and hold Secretary McMahon accountable for the thousands of unresolved disability complaints now languishing without resolution. We call on states and local school districts to recognize that diminished federal enforcement does not lessen their legal and moral obligations to disabled students under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Section 504, and the ADA. And we call on the disability rights community to continue pursuing every available avenue — through federal courts, state proceedings, and grassroots and community advocacy — to ensure that disabled children receive the education and the dignity they are owed.
Justice delayed is justice denied. For disabled students, the denial has been systemic, deliberate, and unconscionable.
