A group of civil rights organizations is seeking an order to prevent the closure of a Justice Department office dedicated to preventing unrest and violence in U.S. cities.
The groups are suing for a preliminary injunction to avert the closure of the Community Relations Service, which was launched in 1964 to avert rioting and racial strife in American communities.
The office has been known informally as “America’s Peacemaker.”
As CBS News reported in April, the Trump administration was planning to shutter the Community Relations Service.
In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, several organizations, including multiple NAACP branches and the Baptist Convention of Missouri, argue that the Justice Department is violating the law in closing the office.
“Rather than pursue legislation to eliminate the agency, however, (the Justice Department) set out to destroy the Community Relations Service unilaterally,” the lawsuit said. “Defendants did so behind closed doors, without notice or public input, and without consulting the communities that depend on the Community Relations Service.”
“The Department of Justice refuses to follow the law — and it cannot offer any coherent explanation for its actions,” the lawsuit also said. “Instead, the Executive Branch is brazenly defying Congress.”
President John F. Kennedy conceived of the office in the early 1960s, saying the federal government should have experts who can “identify tensions before they reach the crisis stage” and “work quietly to ease tensions and improve relations in any community threatened or torn with strife.”
The office has a history of intervening during periods of heightened national unrest. It was credited with helping prevent another riot in 1993, as racial tensions re-emerged after the second trial of police who beat Rodney King in California.
It also worked to ease rising racial tensions after the 1997 fatal police shooting of a Chinese-American man in Rohnert Park, California, in Akron, Ohio, in 2022, after the shooting of a Black man by police and deploying twice to Minneapolis during the trial of Derek Chauvin after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 in Minnesota.
The newly filed lawsuit also includes details of the office’s history, pointing out that in the 1970s, CRS had been “involved in mediating school desegregation conflicts” and played a major role in helping Boston address the busing crisis that arose during desegregation.
Kyle Freeny, a senior attorney with the Washington Litigation Group, is representing the civil rights groups in their lawsuit.
“The Community Relations Service was not an abstract government agency to these plaintiffs,” Freeny told CBS News. “It was an active partner helping them mediate racial tensions, support faith communities, protect vulnerable students and address discrimination in real time. By dismantling CRS, the government cut off proven, irreplaceable support that these organizations depended on to carry out their missions.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
In a speech in July 2024, Justin Lock, a former director of the Community Relations Service, lauded the office’s accomplishments, saying it had been “at the intersection of some of the most critical moments in our nation’s journey toward justice.”
“In 2020, when Americans marched in solidarity with the people of Brunswick, Georgia; Louisville, Kentucky; and Minneapolis, Minnesota, following the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, CRS engaged with communities as an impartial, confidential facilitator, helping stakeholders identify and implement solutions that help communities to heal and move forward,” Locke said.
