Feds Join Lawsuit Against Evanston Over Reparations Program

EVANSTON, IL — Evanston’s reparations housing program is facing a new federal challenge after the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division moved to intervene in a lawsuit over the city’s cash and housing assistance for Black residents and their descendants.

Judicial Watch, a conservative organization of lawyers, filed a class action lawsuit against the city over the reparations program in February. The group argued that Evanston's use of race as an eligibility requirement for its reparations program violates the Equal Protection of the Fourteenth Amendment because "Remedying societal discrimination is not a compelling governmental interest."

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The federal filing targets the city’s “Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program,” which Evanston adopted in 2019.

“Under the pretext of paying reparations for events more than 100 years ago, the City of Evanston has chosen to distribute millions of dollars in cash and housing benefits to people because of the color of their skin or the color of the skin of their parents, grandparents, or great grandparents,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “There are sound ways for a city to remedy past discrimination or direct resources to its most vulnerable citizens and neighborhoods. Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer. It is race discrimination, pure and simple. And it is illegal.”

The city's reparations program was established in 2019 and was approved by the Evanston City Council in 2021. It is the first government-funded initiative in the United States that aimed to provide reparations to Black Evanston residents, and their direct descendants, who faced housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969.

In February, the Evanston Reparations Committee announced it will soon issue $25,000 payments to 44 additional descendants this year. To date, 137 people have received reparations through the program, totaling more than $3 million.

The United Nations defines reparations as measures to redress violations of human rights by providing a range of material and symbolic benefits to victims or their families.

The underlying lawsuit was filed in 2024 by descendants of people who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 but were not Black. The case, Flinn, et al. v. City of Evanston, No. 24-cv-4269, challenges their exclusion from the program under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

A federal court denied the city’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit in March 2026. That same month, the United States opened an investigation under the Equal Protection Clause and the Fair Housing Act. According to the Justice Department, the city refused to cooperate in that investigation. The United States is now seeking to intervene in the pending case.

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that government actions classifying citizens by race are presumptively unconstitutional,” said U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros for the Northern District of Illinois. “The Constitution demands that the government treat citizens as individuals, not as members of a racial class. Distributing public funds based on an individual's ancestry or race divides the citizenry and establishes the very hierarchy the Equal Protection Clause was designed to dismantle.”