DOJ ends monitoring of illegal dumping in Houston in retreat from environmental justice

HOUSTON (AP) — The U.S. Justice Department has withdrawn from an agreement with the city of Houston to curb illegal dumping in Black and Latino neighborhoods, part of the Trump administration’s broad dismantling of environmental justice initiatives.

Federal authorities quietly ended the monitoring this year as they pulled the plug on a similar settlement over wastewater problems in rural Alabama, according to three former law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the move wasn’t made public.

Without federal monitoring, advocates in Houston said city officials have become less responsive to residents afflicted by persistent dumping in the historically Black neighborhood of Trinity/Houston Gardens.

“We have nothing to fight with anymore,” resident Huey German-Wilson, who has spent years drawing attention to the problem, told The Associated Press during a tour of illegal dumping hotspots. “We’ve got a watered-down EPA. We’ve got no assistance from the DOJ. The city has no reason to respond to us, and we’re finding that they are truly ignoring us.”

The Justice Department declined to comment. Houston officials did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Rotting carcasses’

A DOJ investigation found in 2023 that the Houston neighborhood in question had been inundated by illegal dumping of trash, medical waste, mattresses and even dead bodies and “rotting carcasses” — a description local officials insisted was exaggerated.

Its settlement with the city called for three years of federal monitoring, public data reporting requirements and community outreach to impacted neighborhoods.

Former Mayor Sylvester Turner, a Democrat who died this year after winning a U.S. House seat, had called the DOJ investigation “absurd, baseless and without merit,” though his administration later agreed to the federal monitoring. The city previously has pointed to its efforts to combat illegal dumping through One Clean Houston, a multimillion-dollar cleanup and enforcement initiative.

The nixing of the settlement, which was set to expire in June 2026, came as the Trump administration directed federal agencies to eliminate jobs and programs dedicated to environmental justice. It followed President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order putting a stop to diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the U.S. government.

“The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in April when the Justice Department announced it was ending an agreement with Alabama over persistent wastewater issues in Lowndes County. “President Trump made it clear: Americans deserve a government committed to serving every individual with dignity and respect, and to expending taxpayer resources in accordance with the national interest, not arbitrary criteria.”

Lowndes County is a high-poverty area between Selma and Montgomery where a type of soil makes it difficult for traditional septic tanks to work. A federal investigation found the majority-Black community has long been exposed to raw sewage and lacked basic sanitation services as officials engaged in a pattern of inaction and neglect.

The Alabama agreement required the state to develop a public health and infrastructure improvement plan and stop prosecuting residents who lack the resources to install or repair wastewater systems. It was the result of the Justice Department’s first environmental justice investigation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits recipients of federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin in their federally funded programs and activities.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced it was changing its regulations under Title VI to require “proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions.” The department said it was ending regulations that “required recipients of federal funding to make decisions based on race.”

‘It’s never-ending’

In Houston, illegal dumping has been a hot-button issue for years. It drew the DOJ’s attention after Lone Star Legal Aid, a nonprofit law firm that advocates for low-income populations, filed a complaint about city response times lagging considerably for pickups in Black and Latino neighborhoods compared with white communities.

During the first year of federal monitoring, the city picked up illegal dumping much faster, rolled out new vehicles and added workers, said German-Wilson, president of the Trinity/Houston Gardens Super Neighborhood, a community group.

“We could email everybody,” she said, “and they were listening very intently to see what they could do differently.”

This year, the city has received thousands of complaints about illegal dumping, according to data it publishes online, a backlog that was on display last week when an AP reporter walked past piles of trash and debris, including mattresses, construction waste, a toilet, mulch, wooden pieces of a fence and a car bumper. Some of the piles began as long uncollected leaves and tree branches.

“We also find animals dumped in the midst of all of this,” German-Wilson said. “It’s never-ending.”

Other environmental justice advocates said ending the Alabama and Houston settlements was short-sighted.

“What I find appalling about this administration’s position is these people have not gone out into the community to see how folks are impacted,” said Catherine Coleman Flowers, an activist who filed the civil rights complaint that prompted the Alabama investigation.

“The message they’re sending is they really don’t understand what they’re doing. There are Americans across the board suffering from these issues.”

__ Mustian reported from New York.