Education Dept. Releases Civil Rights Data 8 Months Late as DOJ Fast-Tracks Parental Rights Lawsuit and Fraud Crackdown

The Education Department quietly posted the 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection to its website this week, according to NPR and Education Week. The agency had promised to release it by December 2025. That makes it more than eight months late.

The CRDC has tracked discipline, bullying, AP access and treatment of students with disabilities in nearly every public school in the country for over 50 years, per NPR. This time there's no First Look Report, the plain-language summary the department has published for more than a decade. Instead, just raw data files for researchers to sort through themselves.

Catherine Lhamon, who ran the Office for Civil Rights under Presidents Obama and Biden, told NPR she's glad the data exists but said it "didn't make it usable for somebody's mom to be able to see what's happening in a school community." Rick Hess, education policy director at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, backed up the criticism, telling Education Week the delay is "a problem" because "these data should be reported regularly."

The Education Department didn't explain the delay to NPR. A spokesperson pointed reporters to the published data and said OCR has already sent schools the 2025-26 collection and started work on 2027-28 and 2029-30. The office cut its staff by half after the administration took over, and the White House has announced plans to move OCR into the Justice Department entirely, per NPR's reporting.

Where OCR's Energy Is Actually Going

While the data collection sat unpublished, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division was busy elsewhere. On Tuesday it sued Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools over a 2024 policy letting staff withhold a student's gender identity from parents in some cases, evaluated case-by-case by district administrators, according to the Daily Signal.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon called it "radical gender ideology" and said parents "decide" for their kids, not schools. The lawsuit leans on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, laws from the 1970s never before used this way, per the Daily Signal. Education Secretary Linda McMahon's department had already found the district in violation of both laws on July 1 and August 25. The district says it fully complied with federal law.

That's a genuine legal fight over whether decades-old privacy statutes cover this specific scenario, and it's headed to court, not settled by press release from either side.

The Fraud Numbers

On the financial side, the Education Department's Fraud Task Force says it saved $400 million in its first four months by turning back on data-sharing agreements with the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security that the Biden administration had switched off, according to the Daily Wire. Deputy Under Secretary James Bergeron told the outlet that included $30 million from cutting off payments to dead people and $10 million from stopping Pell Grant overpayments.

The department now runs every FAFSA application through real-time identity screening and requires ID verification for applicants flagged as high-risk, Bergeron said. The task force, launched in March 2026, has since flagged close to $230 billion in suspect activity across federal aid programs, per the Daily Wire's reporting. That figure is a task-force estimate, not an audited recovery total.

A Prosecutor Fired Mid-Investigation

The civil rights enforcement picture gets murkier on the immigration side. Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans, who was investigating ICE officer Christian Castro over the January shooting of Venezuelan national Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in Minneapolis, was fired this week, according to four sources who spoke to CBS News.

A federal grand jury indicted Castro on six counts of making false statements, not on civil rights charges, and the indictment remains sealed. Castro was taken into custody in Texas on Thursday and is scheduled to make an initial court appearance today, Friday, September 4, a source told CBS News.

ProPublica reported it obtained an email in which Evans told victims' attorneys that "Main Justice and the US Attorney" overrode his objections to pursuing lesser charges. CBS News said it has not independently obtained that email. Three sources told CBS News that Evans is now under DOJ investigation himself, with two saying it centers on alleged leaking.

DHS's original account said Sosa-Celis fled a traffic stop and attacked an agent alongside another man before being shot in self-defense. An FBI affidavit later told a different story, saying a second man fled the stop while Sosa-Celis struck the agent with a broomstick during what the agent described as a three-minute struggle, per CBS News. Whether Evans was pushed out for his handling of the case, for leaking, or both remains unresolved, and no charges against Evans have been filed as of this week.

Across these four stories, the administration is racing on parental rights litigation and financial-aid fraud. The base-level data schools have reported for half a century, and questions about how an ICE shooting was investigated, receive slower attention.