Hear civil rights leaders Lisa Rice (President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Fair Housing Alliance), Reed Colfax (Co-Managing Partner at Relman Colfax), Mikael Rojas (Partner with Outten & Golden) and NCRC board chair and civil rights attorney Carol Johnson in a panel titled “The Future of Civil Rights” that explores how attendees can advance fair housing and equal opportunity in their respective communities.
Speakers:
Reed Colfax, Co-Managing Partner, Relman Colfax
Lisa Rice, President and CEO, National Fair Housing Alliance
Mikael Rojas, Partner, Outten & Golden
Carol Johnson, Chairperson, NCRC Board of Directors
Transcript:
NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.
Johnson 0:09Â
Well, okay, I’m geared up for a riveted conversation.
So let me just get started because I want to definitely leave enough time for our panelists to get into the heart of why we’re here this afternoon. You know, we all know that civil rights is not theoretical. The fact that we still need civil rights protections is evident that or the fact that we still have unequal treatment, let’s go back. The fact that we have unequal treatment across this country makes the work that much more important and that much more essential. Whatever our policy differences are, we can’t ignore that fact that we still need civil rights within the country, that we still need the protections, and that we still need organizations such as those represented here and and also here at NCRC to help to do this work, so I’m going to I’m going to turn it over to our panelists here.
We look forward to a very grounded conversation about enforcement, about fairness, and what is definitely at stake for our families and our communities. And so we’re joined today by very, three very deeply respected and admired colleagues in the civil rights struggle. We have Lisa Rice, who has been a leading national voice for fair housing and equitable access for opportunity for many years. We have Reed Colfax, who is one of the country’s foremost fair housing litigators, who has a long track record of advancing civil rights through the courts. And, then we have Mikael Rojas, who brings experience from both civil rights litigation and senior leadership at the Department of Justice, where he was at since 2024.
So, I’m going to get started with the first question, which is going to go to Lisa. Lisa heads a national civil rights organization working at the intersection of lending and housing and civil rights enforcement. And many people are asking, what priorities are most vulnerable right now. So, from your vantage point, what civil rights protections are at greatest risk of being sidelined, and what would be the real-world consequences for families and communities if fair housing and fair lending enforcement were weakened at this time?
Rice 3:04
Carol, thank you so much for the question. And, let me first start by thanking Jesse and NCRC for inviting me to be with you all here today. Hello everyone, and I want to thank you all for the important work that you do every single day in your communities on the ground. We know that fair housing and fair lending work is not easy. It is very difficult. Whether you are inside a bank or a real estate company or at a fair housing organization or a CDFI, we’re all working towards one goal and that is advancing fair housing and fair lending in our nation. So thank you for what you do every day.
Carol, to answer your question, everything is at risk. Everything is at risk, and what we are seeing is a rolling back of core civil rights protections, core civil rights functions at the very upper echelons of our government. That portends some very dangerous, harmful things for people throughout the country. From what I can see in terms of civil rights enforcement, there are no priorities. What is happening is civil rights is being deprioritized. And, even if we listen to the whistleblowers within HUD who told us about what is happening inside the organization, they said themselves, I’m swearing an oath. They said that they were told by this administration that fair housing would be deprioritized and that civil rights would be deprioritized.
Now, I’m the kind of person. I’m not from Missouri. I am from the great state of Ohio, but I believe that if you tell me something, that’s fine, but I’m going to believe what you show me. And, if we look at what this HUD is showing us, we see several things. We see that this HUD took down the complaint, the very intricate complaints process that had been the entire complaint infrastructure for filing fair housing and fair lending complaints that had been put in place throughout the country. This administration dismantled all of that and relegated the complaint process to an online portal that does not contain all of the characteristics that it needs to contain for people filing complaints to be ensured that they have officially filed a complaint at HUD and that it will be legally recognized under a court of law.
We know that this HUD has dismantled the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. Civil rights employees with fair lending and fair housing expertise have been fired. They have been removed. They have been riffed. And, people who don’t have any fair housing or fair lending expertise, and as you all know, this area is highly specialized. It takes years and years to become an expert in fair housing and fair lending. That expertise is almost all gone. We know and have seen that fair housing organizations who are doing the work on the ground were defunded, defunded illegally. Our members received notification, as I’m sure many of you did in this room, that their fair housing contracts had been canceled midstream. No advance warning, no advance notification. Fair housing contracts canceled, and they were notified after 7pm Eastern Standard Time on a Friday evening.
Now that does not sound like prioritizing civil rights. And let me just, let me just explain real world implications here. One of our members on the ground was in the throes of assisting a family whose daughter had been sexually molested by an employee of the apartment management company assisting that family to remain safely and stably housed, working with local law enforcement officials when they received the notification that their FHIP funding was ended and they were going to have to lay off all their staff. And who’s going to help this victim of discrimination?
Another organization was assisting a woman whose husband tried to kill her. Who tried to stab her. Who did stab her over 30 times. She was in the hospital recovering. Her landlord wanted to evict her while she’s recovering. The fair housing organization was providing assistance to her, making sure that she could stay safely housed and that her things wouldn’t be thrown out on the street when they received the notification that they were being defunded. And I could go on and on and on with example after example after example of people in communities throughout our nation experiencing discrimination when the fair housing organizations that were helping them receive notification you’re not getting your funding, and by the way, we didn’t even have the decency to give you a forewarning so that you could try and make sure that you could get some funding streams to keep your staff funded.
So I’m going to stop there, Carol, but I could, I could be here all night with examples of actions that this administration has taken to hurt and harm fair housing organizations. In fact, don’t look any further than the latest budget that just came out. You just heard the Assistant Deputy Secretary say that he was here to support all of you. Look at this fiscal year, ’27 budget. You’ve all been defunded. How is that helping? In my opinion, it is not. Put your money where your mouth is. Your budget is a reflection of your priority. And, if you prioritize fair housing, you wouldn’t be defunding fair housing organizations. You wouldn’t be defunding the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. And, you wouldn’t be limiting the funding of state fair housing organizations.
Johnson 10:12Â
As someone who, I’ve been a state civil rights director, director in three different states, and, you know, working with HUD and other federal organizations for funding. It’s a very complicated process, but it keeps the doors open for most of these organizations, especially, you know, the FHIP agencies and the FHAP agencies that rely very heavily on that. So, your comments are well taken about the budget and what that’s really going to mean for families in our communities. So, I’m going to ask, I’m going to move the next question on. And, this question is for Reid, you know, given you know where we are, and we’ve heard the Assistant Secretary just speak. Where do you see the greatest risk for, you know, fair lending issues, underwriting, appraisal bias, special purpose credit programs? Where are you seeing the greatest risk in fair housing and fair landing right now?
Colfax 11:21Â
Well, I think the answer to that question is all of the above, and the reason for it just walked off the stage.
You know, that speech could have been given in the 1860s. In the 1860s, right after, following, the Civil War, Congress got together. Senators were debating: How do we deal with the fact that we have enslaved a population for centuries at that point? How do we deal with it? And, there was a whole group of senators, also supported by President Johnson, who said, “We need to just have a color blindness in this country. All we need an amendment to the Constitution that requires color blindness.” You know what happened? That got rejected, and what was actually passed was the 14th Amendment that said, we actually have to give equal protection of the laws to everybody.
And, with that came an affirmative duty to government, federal governments and state governments, to ensure that equal protection of the laws. And what did that mean? That means there were times where you actually had to give benefit to people you have discriminated against, to people you have oppressed, to people who you have acted in violence against for centuries. And that’s what Congress did in the 1860s, right? You had the Freedmen Bureau’s Act. You had all of these programs and policies that said, “Hey, we have to do something to redress what we have done to Black people in this country.” It wasn’t just formerly enslaved people, it was freed Blacks in the North as well.
And, so Mr. Trainor comes in here to give us a history lesson, but it’s actually completely inaccurate, right? And, these ideas that are being propounded today were rejected 160 years ago. To think that this country is in a spot where we were 160 years ago is just horrifying and depressing. So, that’s the biggest threat to fair housing enforcement, fair lending enforcement today and Lisa touched on some of the very, very important things, right, the defunding. Right, all, many of the organizations, including NCRC itself, which rely on federal funds to get fair housing and fair lending services and resources out to people and communities. Zeroed out. All [of] these extraordinary important, extraordinarily important programs like CDBG funds, which is like one point something billion dollars. Zero in President Trump’s budget. So, anything that Mr. Trainor talks about as being, “Hey, we’re here to enforce” anything is just flat wrong. They’re not interested in intentional discrimination. If they were, they would be funding these organizations that have been in place for decades now finding all forms of discrimination, including intentional discrimination. So, that’s just not accurate at all.
Then, you look at the actual enforcement, or lack of enforcement, from DOJ, CFPB and HUD, and it shows, again, just one quick anecdote, right, the recent settlement of the Colony Ridge case out in Houston. So, this was a massive operation with 10’s of 1000’s of lots where there was this predatory lending scheme where they would target mostly recent Latinx immigrants with these unfair loans that they had no chance of being able to pay back. They got them into these loans then actually exploited them further by having them improve the properties. Then, the inevitable foreclosure comes. They flip the property and do it again. 15,000 lots, right? So 10’s of 1000’s of people are affected. Biden’s DOJ comes in, files a case, investigates, pushing it forward. It doesn’t get done before Trump comes in and they settle the case. Do you know how much so, $16 million right? Pretty good settlement. Do you know how many dollars the victims of that predatory scheme got? Correct, absolutely nothing. You know where $20 million went? To police and immigration enforcement.
So, you know, the way the case was filed, they had to get the court approval for that settlement. The court just said, No, that’s nothing is going to the victim. So, there are all sorts of problems with the settlement, including that. And so DOJ is just going to back out and settle the case privately. So, that’s the kind of enforcement, complete non-enforcement. In fact, it’s doing the reverse of what it should be doing, right? You’re funding the very oppressors that are, you know, partially responsible for the problems at a place like this. So, you look at, they’re taking away the tools like disparate impact, they’re not funding the organizations, and they’re not doing their own enforcement. So, the threats go on like Lisa [said], right. You could sit here all day and talk about the threats to funding, to fair housing and fair lending enforcement. So the answer is, better get out and vote.
Johnson 17:24Â
And Reed, you mentioned, you know, taking away the tools. I mean, even use of the False Claims Act, it’s just, it’s such a distortion of the few things that we really did have that are effective litigation tools, you know, to advance forward. So, I mean, it’s we got a lot to deal with right now. So also, having worked at the Justice Department myself, I’m a little dismayed about the state of things. And, Mikael, this next question is going to be for you. So, if federal agencies de-emphasize enforcement and oversight, where would communities feel that first, and where should communities look to enforce their rights?
Rojas 18:10Â
Happy to take on that question. I would love to start with a quick personal anecdote because this is a little bit of a full-circle moment for me. This is probably a similar story for many of the people in the audience. But, first of all, I want to clarify, based on my introduction, I don’t currently work at the Justice Department. I’m a former Justice Department lawyer. I was in the Biden Justice Department, played a small role on the Colony Ridge case that Reid just talked about. I don’t work there anymore. [I’m] back in private practice, where I represent civil rights plaintiffs and workers’ rights plaintiffs.
But, this is a really unique moment for me, and I feel compelled to say something personal because of what we just heard from the previous speaker who make no mistake about it, is not about even-handed enforcement. He’s about attacking communities of color, just like every other person in the administration, and we can go across the board from agency to agency and see how Black students, Brown students, Middle Eastern students are attacked on our campuses for their free speech rights. That’s something Mr. Trainor was responsible for personally in his previous role at the Department of Education.
We can talk about the workers’ rights field, where I spend most of my time these days, where the chairperson of the EEOC actually put out a Twitter post soliciting discrimination complaints from White men. I thought we heard a message of even-handed enforcement. The law applies to everybody. Everyone’s entitled to civil rights. Well, the message we get from across the administration, including the EEOC, is that we want your complaint if you are a White man, and as someone who spent 11 years litigating largely workers’ rights cases, people who come knocking at my door for representation for being sexually harassed or hitting the glass ceiling are not White men. And they’re overrepresented in positions of power across the board.
So, you know, I know you know this, but sometimes I find it refreshing just to state the obvious out loud: Mr. Trainor and the Trump administration don’t care about civil rights. They’ve turned the entire regime on its head, and it’s up to the people in this room to fight and preserve what we have.
And I said I was gonna start with a personal anecdote, which is I moved to Washington, DC, to work for Reed Colfax, and I’ve looked up to folks at NFHA and NCRC for a long time. It’s a real treat for me to be here and be speaking as a sort of peer with these with these advocates. And, I would not be here if it weren’t for the advocacy of people like those in this room. My parents are immigrants. They bought a house in a White neighborhood. First Brown family on the block. I got to go to [a] predominantly White public school that gave me better educational opportunities than the school district I would have gone to. Was able to go to college. First in my family to go to college, was able to go to a good law school thanks to the people making educational opportunities available for people of color and opening the doors at elite institutions.
So, I’m a direct product of everything that Mr. Trainor is fighting to deconstruct, and I just want to name that and say, you know, I’m not going anywhere and I know that no one else is going anywhere either, so they’re dark times. But you know, I know folks are gonna keep, keep fighting good fights.
So back to your original question, where do folks go now that the federal government is not really in the business of enforcing civil rights. We have 18,000 state and local governments across the country. State and local governments are an essential part of the enforcement ecosystem. With the federal government not really being open for business. We have a great crop of state AGs. We’ve been very active in challenging a lot of the discriminatory actions we’ve seen out of the federal government, and we have wonderful nonprofits like NFHA. We have civil rights lawyers like Reed Colfax, the folks at my firm, who have been picking up cases that have been dropped by federal agencies.
So, I don’t know if any of you are from the Midwest or Northeast and are familiar with the Sheetz convenience store chain. Sheetz was sued years ago by the EEOC for refusing to hire people with any sort of criminal background. And, we all know that the criminal justice system in the United States has historically over policed and over-incarcerated, people of color. So, you are much more likely simply by virtue of being a Black or Brown person, particularly a man, of being justice-involved. And, that results in many, many downstream effects on your ability to find a place to live and to find a place to work. So, the EEOC brought a case against Sheetz for its over[ly] broad criminal history ban. That case was dropped. Completely dropped. Not settled as terrible as the Colony Ridge settlement was. It was dropped because disparate impact is allegedly unconstitutional.
Mind you, Mr. Trainor worked at America First Legal before he came to government. They brought disparate treatment cases, and right-wing legal organizations continue to bring disparate treatment cases. But, our firm stepped in, filed a motion to intervene and continue that litigation. So, there are options out there. Elections do matter. You know, the federal government plays an essential role in the federal civil rights enforcement ecosystem.
But for those of you who are coming from the sort of regulated entities here, I promised the panelists I would make this pitch to you directly: please continue to enforce civil rights. Please do not be cowed by the government on their debunked anti-DEI theories. Because if you do, if you roll back and turn the page on civil rights and go back to discriminatory practices that have been challenged in the past, lawyers like me are desperate to sue you. Desperate, desperately looking to sue you for rolling back on your civil rights obligations. And, I have quarterly meetings with other folks to look at potential targets. So, the courts are doing their best in this environment. Lawyers, nonprofits, state AGs, local governments are doing their best to fill in the gap, but it’s going to take all of us working together.
Rice 24:25Â
Can I just pick up on what both Reed and Mikhail laid down? And, that is this sort of ruse of trying to end discrimination by stopping and thwarting DEI efforts. We all see it for what it really is, and that is a rollback of civil rights protections and, actually, fomenting discrimination against certain groups under this guise of eliminating DEI. If you look at who is mostly being impacted by these anti-DEI efforts that the Trump administration has implemented it is Black and Brown people, even though the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action and DEI programs are White people. In fact, White women are the overwhelming beneficiaries of affirmative action and DEI programs, and always have been since the beginnings of affirmative action programs over 50 years ago.
But, look at who’s being targeted in this moment to Mikael’s point. So nobody is being fooled by this and rolling back civil rights protections and civil rights compliance just leaves you open because the arm of justice is long. It is very long, and you do not want to find yourself on the wrong end of that long arm of justice when this administration has concluded. So, I just wanted to double down on what both Reed and Mikael said.
I mean, listen, let me give you this example. You just heard Mr. Trainor say that they want to go all in on intentional discrimination. You just heard him say that. But, what he didn’t tell you is that there have been numerous cases where HUD issued a probable cause finding for intentional discrimination. Let me say that again: numerous cases where HUD had issued a probable cause finding for intentional discrimination that this administration has rescinded.
We were leading a national advertisement campaign, a national PSA campaign, to educate the public about intentional discrimination. Now, what sparked that was a story of Dr. Raven Baxter, a marine biologist who tried to purchase an $800,000 home in Virginia Beach. When the owner of the property saw her and saw that she was a Black woman, the owner told her real estate agent, “I will never sell my home to a Black person.” Guess what? That’s intentional discrimination, and we had convinced Dr. Baxter to be the face of our intentional discrimination Public Service Announcement campaign. She agreed. We completed all of the collateral. We got all of the marketing pieces done. This Trump administration told us, “No, you cannot implement that campaign about intentional discrimination.”
So, all of these, all of these attestations about wanting to address intentional discrimination, it is not true. And, the more you know the truth about what is really happening, the more you can stay on your post, stay where you should be, and advance compliance with our nation’s civil rights laws, and that includes the bevy of fair lending and fair housing laws that we have both at the federal, the state and the local level.
Johnson 28:36Â
Thank you. We’ve just got a few moments, but I want to… First, I am so, you know, this conversation is so necessary, and I wish we had hours more, you know, to delve into some of these things that we heard earlier. And, obviously we don’t. But, you know, if there was one thing that you could leave the audience with, you know, we’ve heard HUD’s priorities. You know, we heard what’s coming down the pipeline, we see what’s already out there, right? There’s one thing you could leave this audience with today, given all that we know, what would it be? And, I would like for each one of you, if you would, to respond.
Colfax 29:19Â
Well, I think I would just pick up where Lisa left off, which is, keep on keeping on. We’re going to see the other side of this. But, if we participate in any way in this rollback, and speaking particularly to the financial institutions that are represented here: hold on. Because not only has it been good to the communities that you serve, but it’s good for your business to make sure that everybody has access to credit, to homes, you name it. And, if we stay the path and we get onto the other side. Even if the federal government saying, “You shouldn’t be doing this, and we’re certainly not going to enforce it if you fail to do it.” So what? It’s good for business. It’s good for our communities. It’s good for our society. It’s good for our country. So keep on keeping on.
Rice 30:19Â
Thank you. I want to admonish you all. I’ve got a call to action for you. Last year, the Trump administration zeroed out fair housing funding in the fiscal year ’26 budget just as they have zeroed out fair housing funding in the fiscal year ’27 budget, and we were very successful in getting Congress to reverse that trend. And, Congress fully funded at least the Fair Housing Initiatives Program and the Fair Housing Administration’s program. So, I’m going to ask you all to go to our call to action, reach out to your congressional representatives and encourage them to fully fund fair housing, the Fair Housing Initiatives Program, the housing counseling programs. Please admonish your elected officials to do that. Bit.ly, B, i, t, period, l, y, forward slash, FHIP, f, h, i, p, 27. Again, that’s Bit.ly, forward slash, FHIP, 27. Please elevate this issue for your members of Congress to make sure that our local organizations can be fully funded.
Rojas 31:34Â
I’ll just say briefly, we haven’t talked about AI, which is probably a relief to most of the people in this room who are tired of hearing about AI. But, obviously we’re in a de-regulatory environment when it comes to technology and innovation, and there’s a lot of risks, which all you know well, in terms of the civil rights impact of automating decisions across many protected areas, including lending, housing and employment. But, like Reed said, we’re going to get past this particular period in which the government is actively courting favor with Big Tech. And, I think people, like the one thing that is, like less popular than anything in the world is AI right now, and I think the balance will shift back where people want responsible AI. So, to those of you working on those initiatives and advocacy around those issues: Please, please stay the course.
Johnson 32:27Â
Thank you. Thank you so much. Can we give them a round of applause please? Thank you. Thank you. We are going to move into some receptions and some other things this afternoon. You all know we’re going to the Hill. Please, please, please, please, please take this information back to Congress. It is important. DEI is not a dirty word. Neither is civil rights. And, the work that we do it’s, it’s, we still need it, okay, and the work that we do is so important.
