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The administration’s view is that the mere presence of students of color at elite schools is incontrovertible proof of discrimination against white people.
Law & Politics
Affirmative Action
By Madiba K. Dennie May 18, 2026
In April 2025, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Yale University, accusing its medical school of making admissions decisions based on race and, in so doing, violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On Thursday, May 14, the agency published its predictable findings: “Yale discriminated against other applicants to benefit preferred race classes of Black and Hispanic.” About a week earlier, Trump’s DOJ reached the identical conclusion about UCLA School of Medicine.
In both cases, there was no real doubt it would do so. The conservative legal movement has spent decades arguing that laws designed to remedy the effects of white supremacy—in education, elections, and elsewhere—require the entrenchment of white supremacy instead. And throughout his second term, Trump has aggressively built on this legal foundation for resegregation. The DOJ’s latest findings treat the mere existence of Black students as legal grounds for threatening a school’s federal funding—a standard that could make other medical schools more reluctant to admit Black students, which would have a devastating impact on the health of Black communities.
The DOJ first purports to show Yale’s “intent to discriminate” through a review of the medical school’s internal policies and practices. Specifically, the government alleges that Yale conducts interviews “that enable the committee to know applicants’ race and ethnicity,” and considers applicants’ socioeconomic status, which functions as a “racial proxy.”
The Trump administration’s smoking-gun evidence for this conclusion is an orientation packet that Yale provided to admissions personnel, which included a “holistic metrics model” produced by the Association of American Medical Colleges, an organization that helps accredit medical schools. The DOJ findings letter complains that AAMC’s model “shows a myriad of factors that appear unrelated to medicine.” And it features an image of AAMC’s graphic, with the most offensive characteristics—“race” and “national origin”—circled in red.
https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/yale-medical-school-trump-doj-findings/
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Trump DOJ: Yale’s Medical School Has Way Too Many Black Students