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FIRST ON FOX— America First Legal (AFL) filed a civil rights complaint Thursday against the city of Chicago and the Chicago Police Department (CPD), alleging the city operates a race-based system in both recruitment and enforcement.
“Chicago is disguising its discriminatory actions under the pretext of ‘racial equity,’ openly defying federal civil rights laws and Executive Orders issued by President Donald J. Trump,” AFL counsel Alice Kass wrote in the legal complaint. “Bureaucrats have embedded ‘equity’ principles throughout the Chicago government, including in the CPD, where race is a central consideration in recruitment, hiring, promotion, and retention decisions.”
The complaint, obtained by Fox News Digital, cites the mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice which, according to Chicago’s municipal code, is tasked to “develop and coordinate the implementation and maintenance” of “racial equity action plans” that are created by each city department.
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More specifically, the CPD’s racial equity action plan states the department “intends to improve equitable outcomes, reduce racial disparities, and achieve racial equity and inclusion in CPD’s core work by fostering inclusivity, diversity, and fairness within the Department and its interactions with the community.”
The plan, which was designed to take three years from 2024 to 2026 to implement, also calls for “assessing hiring processes for equity” and “identifying the impacts of bias” in the department’s culture.
“CPD’s recruitment strategies aim to build a workforce that mirrors the city’s demographics while emphasizing equity and inclusivity,” the plan states.
According to the CPD website, the police department’s equity plan extends to policing by “addressing systemic inequities that disproportionately affect marginalized racial and ethnic communities,” which Kass argues assumes disparities are caused by race alone.
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“[T]he Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected this logic, holding that statistical disparities alone do not justify race-conscious remedies and that Title VI prohibits intentional discrimination regardless of the stated goal of achieving equity,” Kass wrote.
The AFL claimed that the city of Chicago is violating Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through its “express” consideration of race in hiring and enforcement decisions, and it has requested the Department of Justice‘s Civil Rights Division investigate the matter.
Fox News Digital reached out to the city of Chicago and the Chicago Police Department for comment.
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The complaint comes a little more than one week after Democratic Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice over the Trump administration’s requirements that cities certify grant funds will not be used for programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
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Johnson also filed a similar lawsuit in October challenging Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant conditions requiring cities to certify they do not have programs that “advance or promote DEI, DEIA or discriminatory equity ideology.”
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