Civil rights rollback 2026 is already reshaping voting rights, policing, abortion access, and economic policy across the country.
The Supreme Court handed down a ruling today that should stop everybody in their tracks. In a 6 to 3 decision, the conservative majority gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the heart of the law that gave Black people in this country the actual ability to elect representation that looks like us, that fights for us, that knows us. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion. The three liberal justices dissented. NAACP President Derrick Johnson called it a “devastating blow.” Harvard Law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, who filed a brief defending the Act, put it plainer than that. He said Section 2 is “still there, in theory, but no one will be able to win a claim under the provision.” Translation. States can dismantle Black majority districts whenever they feel like it as long as they say it was for political reasons instead of racial ones, and good luck proving the difference in court.
The Trump administration backed the challenge. That detail matters because it’s the through line of everything that has happened since January 20, 2025. Donald Trump didn’t just walk into the White House for a second term. He walked in with a checklist, and that checklist was Project 2025, and the entire mission was to roll back six decades of civil rights progress that Black people, women, and every other marginalized community fought, bled, marched, and died to secure. Fifteen months in, he’s running through the list, and it’s time we look at it honestly.
Start with the foundation. On January 21, 2025, his second day in office, Trump signed Executive Order 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Sounds patriotic until you realize what it actually did. It revoked Executive Order 11246, the order Lyndon B. Johnson signed in 1965 in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement that required federal contractors to engage in non-discriminatory hiring practices. That order had been continuously in effect for 60 years. Every administration, Republican and Democrat, had kept it in place because it was the legal scaffolding that made it possible for Black people, women, and other underrepresented groups to access federal contracting jobs without being shut out at the door. Trump killed it with the stroke of a pen. The Department of Labor was directed to cease “promoting diversity,” to stop requiring affirmative action, and to stop “allowing or encouraging” workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, or national origin. The same week, every federal agency was ordered to eliminate environmental justice and DEI offices and positions by March 20, 2025. Gone. Decades of policy infrastructure dismantled in 60 days.
Then came the voting rights assault, and the Louisiana case is just the climax of a longer story. Five days into the second term, the Department of Justice notified the Supreme Court that its earlier position in Louisiana v. Callais, which had supported a second majority Black congressional district, no longer represented the government’s view. They flipped sides. Then the DOJ reassigned the senior civil rights officials who had been overseeing the government’s litigating positions on transgender rights, affirmative action, police misconduct, and other anti-discrimination issues. Then the SAVE America Act, Trump’s “priority elections bill,” moved through the House and into the Senate. The bill would require every American to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register or re-register to vote, eliminate online and mail-in voter registration, force voters to appear in person at a board of elections to update any information including a name change or address, and mandate that states share voter data with the Department of Homeland Security. The Brennan Center estimates 21 million Americans don’t have easy access to the documents they would need to comply. Married women who changed their names. Trans people. Elderly Black voters in the South whose birth records were lost decades ago to floods, fires, and hospitals that didn’t bother documenting Black births properly in the first place. According to a 2023 Pew survey, more than 80 percent of women change or hyphenate their names after marriage. The SAVE Act would force every one of them to chase down paperwork to keep voting. The Senate hasn’t passed it yet, but red state legislatures aren’t waiting. Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Utah, and South Dakota have already signed bills mirroring it. Florida’s law, which civil rights groups are suing to block, names elderly Black voters and Puerto Ricans whose birth certificates don’t exist as the people who will be locked out.
While voting access was being squeezed, women’s bodies became a federal target. Within his first week, Trump rescinded the Biden executive orders that had been issued in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs. Those orders had directed agencies to protect emergency abortion care, defend patient privacy on reproductive health data, and expand information about contraception. All gone. Then came the pardons. Trump pardoned 23 anti-abortion extremists who had been convicted under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, the law that makes it a federal crime to use force, threats, or physical obstruction against people providing or seeking reproductive health care. These weren’t peaceful protesters. They were people who had barricaded clinic entrances with chains and bike locks, harassed patients and providers, and assaulted clinic staff. Pardoned. Set free. Days later, the Department of Justice announced it would no longer enforce the FACE Act except in “extraordinary cases.” The signal to anti-abortion extremists across the country was clear. The federal government has your back now.
The dismantling kept rolling. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth rescinded the policy that allowed servicewomen and military dependents to travel and take time off to access abortion care, which matters profoundly because military bases are disproportionately located in states that have banned abortion entirely. The Veterans Affairs Department announced in August 2025 it would propose rescinding the Biden era rule that allowed VA facilities to provide abortion care for veterans in cases of rape, incest, or threats to the patient’s life. The administration removed ReproductiveRights.gov, the federal website created to give people accurate information about post Dobbs care. The CDC paused the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, the data collection program that has been used for years to track maternal and infant health outcomes, citing the need to comply with Trump’s executive orders. Without that data, it becomes harder to identify the maternal mortality crisis that is already killing Black women at three to four times the rate of white women. The Department of Health and Human Services has been gutted by 26.2 percent in the proposed 2026 budget, and the workforce was already cut from 82,000 to 62,000 employees through abrupt terminations that shuttered programs mid-stream, including programs critical for maternal and reproductive health. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Martin Makary launched a “review” of mifepristone, the medication used in 63 percent of abortions in this country, with the goal of reinstating restrictions that would block telehealth access and force in-person visits to physicians, which would functionally end medication abortion in rural areas and red states.
Globally, Trump reinstated and expanded the Global Gag Rule, the policy that bars nongovernmental organizations receiving U.S. health funding from providing or even mentioning abortion. He froze nearly all foreign assistance through executive order. Within ten days of the freeze, more than 1.3 million women and girls worldwide had been denied reproductive care. Guttmacher Institute estimates that the cuts could leave 47.6 million people without access to family planning, leading to 17.1 million more unintended pregnancies and 34,000 maternal deaths. The World Health Organization, which the U.S. is also withdrawing from, has said the cuts have made global maternal mortality goals “almost unachievable.
For Black people specifically, the police accountability infrastructure built after George Floyd was demolished. On day one, Trump revoked the Biden executive order on Advancing Effective and Accountable Policing. In February 2025, the DOJ deleted the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, the federal tracking system created to prevent law enforcement officers with histories of misconduct from being rehired by other agencies. In May 2025, the DOJ filed motions to dismiss the consent decrees with the Minneapolis Police Department and the Louisville Metro Police Department, the two agreements that had been reached after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The Louisville agreement had required officers to use de-escalation techniques, to use force only when reasonable and proportional, and to investigate officer misconduct fully and consistently. The administration’s lawyer called it “micromanagement.” On April 28, 2025, Trump signed a new executive order directing federal resources toward “aggressive policing tactics,” further militarizing local law enforcement, and providing greater protections for officers accused of misconduct. The message could not be clearer.
The economic warfare runs underneath all of it. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Congress slashed Medicaid and SNAP, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates the law will reduce resources for the poorest Americans by about $1,600 per year while delivering the wealthiest a gain of $12,000. About 30 percent of Black Americans rely on Medicaid. One in five rely on SNAP. The same legislation provided hundreds of millions of dollars in additional resources to ICE for mass deportation, and the D.C. funding cuts in that same bill effectively pulled nearly $1 billion from the District’s local services, including public safety, education, and health, in a city that is majority Black and majority Democratic. Haitians had their Temporary Protected Status partially vacated in February 2025, leaving hundreds of thousands of people facing deportation by August. The Department of Education is on what the administration’s own 2027 budget calls a “path to elimination.”
There’s a particular cynicism in the way some of this has been packaged. In April 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled “Promote Excellence and Innovation at Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” and in September 2025, the administration announced $495 million in new HBCU funding, a 48 percent boost. On its face, that’s a win, and HBCU advocates have to take wins where they come. But the funding came primarily from cuts to other minority serving institutions, especially Hispanic Serving Institutions, which Education Secretary Linda McMahon called “ineffective and discriminatory.” It’s the oldest play in the book. Pit one community against another, fund one to silence the criticism while you defund every other support structure. And while that funding announcement was happening, the same administration was eliminating DEI in higher education, opening Title VI investigations into universities, withholding billions in research funding, and gutting the financial aid pipeline that most Black HBCU students rely on through the Medicaid and SNAP cuts that affect their families’ ability to support college attendance in the first place. You give an institution $500 million while quietly destroying the financial foundation of the students who attend it.
What ties all of this together is the speed and the coordination. This isn’t drift. This isn’t bureaucratic indifference. This is a deliberate, coordinated dismantling of the legal and institutional architecture that protected our right to vote, our right to bodily autonomy, our right to equal treatment under the law, our right to be safe in our own neighborhoods, and our right to economic opportunity. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Executive Order 11246 of 1965. Title IX of 1972. Roe v. Wade in 1973. The accountability frameworks built after Ferguson, after Floyd, after Taylor. Every one of those wins represents people who marched, organized, sat in jail, lost jobs, were beaten, and in too many cases were killed. Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten almost to death for trying to register Black people to vote. Medgar Evers was murdered in his own driveway in Jackson, Mississippi. The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma is named after a Klansman, and people walked across it anyway, knowing what was waiting on the other side. That’s the cost of what just got erased.
And the response from a lot of the country has been a shrug. Because the rollback has been steady, because each individual move can be defended in some technocratic way, because the administration has been smart enough to package some of it as “merit,” some as “religious liberty,” some as “election integrity.” But you string the moves together and the picture is not subtle. The same administration that gutted federal contracting protections also gutted the Voting Rights Act through the courts, also pardoned clinic attackers, also killed police accountability, also slashed Medicaid for the people who need it most, and also handed the wealthiest Americans a $12,000 a year tax win. Those things are not separate stories. They are one story.
Today’s Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act is not the end. It’s the marker. It tells us where we are. And what we do from here, in 2026 and into the midterms and beyond, is what determines whether the next 60 years look anything like the last 60. Derrick Johnson said our best defense and our best offense is the ballot box. He’s right, but only if we still have a ballot box that works for us. Right now, that’s the fight.
