Top House Democrats on Wednesday are asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to spare a civil rights-era office that has frequently been referred to as the “peacemakers program.”
An internal Justice Department memo reviewed by CBS News last month said President Trump’s appointees are considering closing the Community Relations Service, which was created as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The mission of the office is to be “America’s peacemaker,” tasked with “preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions, conflicts, and civil disorders, and in restoring racial stability and harmony.”
In a letter sent Wednesday to Bondi and the Justice Department, more than two dozen House Democrats wrote, “We strongly urge you to abandon any plans of dissolving the work of the Community Relations Service.”
The letter, which included Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who is the ranking member of the House Education Committee, said the Community Relations Service combats violence and city unrest. The letter says the office’s “work also kept places of worship safe after a series of high-profile attacks in recent years.”
Though created during the mid-20th century, the Community Relations Service was expanded under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act in 2008.
The Community Relations Service does not investigate or prosecute crimes and has no law enforcement authority, and according to the Justice Department, its services are both confidential and free of charge to communities that accept or request them. In 2021, the agency said of its mission that it sought to help realize Martin Luther King Jr.’s “inspiring dream of a vibrant, all-embracing nation unified in justice, peace, and reconciliation.”
The House Democrats who are pressing Bondi to spare the office from reductions wrote, “We are aware that during the previous Trump Administration there was a similar effort to abandon the valuable work of the Community Relations Service by recommending its elimination in budget proposals and reducing staffing.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment from CBS News.
The Community Relations Service 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.
“We would find and stop brush fires, before they became forest fires,” said Ron Wakabayashi, a former regional director of the Community Relations Service. Wakabayashi told CBS News last month he fears the nation will be at greater risk of unrest, boycotts and lawsuits without the agency’s Community Relations Service deployed regionally across the U.S..
