Since 1964, the Justice Department has dispatched specialized “peacemaker” experts to quell escalating violent conflicts. Trump shut down his team in October.
Protests after ICE shooting in Minneapolis
Following the ICE-involved shooting in Minneapolis, protesters confronted ICE agents and shouted chants in the streets.
With more than 1,000 protests planned across the United States on Jan. 10 and Jan. 11 amid heightened tensions after two recent shootings by federal immigration enforcement agents, this may seem like a good opportunity for the Justice Department to deploy the “peace” forces that have helped de-escalate confrontations at demonstrations and prevent deadly police responses for decades.
But that’s not possible because the Trump administration shut down the 57-person Community Relations Services Department last October.
The department has previously touted CRS, which since its founding in 1964, has successfully coordinated communications between law enforcement, activists, clergy, city officials and neighborhood leaders in some of the biggest flashpoints in modern history, including Selma, Alabama, in 1965 after the police attack on civil rights protesters on Bloody Sunday, and protests and riots after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
“It’s very frustrating because we know that CRS has the potential to bring immediate value to peace efforts in Minneapolis and elsewhere across the country,” said Julius Nam, a former senior Justice Department official who led the unit until it was notified of layoffs on September 29 last year.
The unit was shut down with Nam’s firing, as were 30 field offices across the United States because the Justice Department said its “missions did not align with its law enforcement and litigation priorities.”
Six years ago, CRS experts were called to Minneapolis to quell escalating clashes between police and protesters after a police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck until he died. The incident occurred on January 7, just blocks from where a federal ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good during a confrontation over a car in the middle of the road.
Good’s killing sparked protests across the U.S. after the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security claimed ICE officer Jonathan Ross acted in self-defense.
Video of the incident has been circulated showing that at least two of the three shots Ross fired struck Good, hitting him from the side of the departing car.
The tense exchange with law enforcement that followed was captured on video, including one in which a DHS officer intentionally kicked over a candle placed at Goode’s memorial.
On January 8, Border Patrol agents shot and killed two people during a traffic stop in Portland, Oregon.
After Mr. Floyd’s killing, CRS experts held weekly virtual meetings and frequent in-person meetings, leading city, police and community leaders to identify steps to reduce conflict. An updated memorandum of understanding was also signed between law enforcement and community groups to prevent future riots and the use of dangerous force by police.
“We know that CRS may have been able to de-escalate the violence that is already occurring, but it could potentially escalate,” Nam, who was a civil rights prosecutor at the Justice Department before leading CRS, said of the current conflict.
Olivia Troy, a former White House homeland security official during the first Trump administration, told USA TODAY that CRS “exists at a moment like this.”
“After federal mass shootings like the one in Minnesota, CRS is supposed to help de-escalate tensions and rebuild community trust, but its ability to do so has been intentionally weakened,” said Troy, who has since become a vocal critic of Trump. “CRS exists to impose accountability before conflict. CRS creates space for facts to surface, grievances to be heard, and to be suppressed. Without CRS, the federal government polices its actions in real time, while communities are left with protest or silence as their only options.”
Brian Levin, a criminologist and civil rights attorney, said the closure of CRS deprived the country of an effective program to quell political violence, which has skyrocketed in recent years.
“Community relations services, the crown jewel of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, have all but disappeared with the president’s explicit application of executive orders, with the exception of some religious litigation,” Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, told USA TODAY.
Asha Rangappa, a senior lecturer at Yale University and a former FBI special agent, said one of the most important contributions of CRS was building trust between communities, police, and federal law enforcement. The work is “kind of the fodder for (law enforcement) to build relationships with the community,” she said.
Mr. Rangappa said that “this is because it will help in the investigation” of the crime by those involved, especially those in positions of authority such as the police involved in the shooting incident. “We need trust from people because we need people to come forward with information. And I think that’s a really, really important element of the Justice Department’s job.”
In response to questions about the CRS closure, White House press secretary Abigail Jackson told USA TODAY that ICE officers in Minneapolis and elsewhere are “acting with the utmost professionalism to make American communities safer.”
Jackson declined to comment on CRS, but said, “Left-wing agitators don’t need a mediator. They need to follow the law.” “Obstructing the operations of law enforcement is a crime, and those who do so will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”
What are DOJ’s Community Relations Services?
CRS was established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after Congress concluded it was necessary to address increasingly violent conflicts over civil rights enforcement. Battles over school desegregation, voting rights, and public accommodations (particularly throughout the South) led to shootings and beatings of African Americans by white counterprotesters and police.
Congress concluded that not all civil rights crises can be resolved by lawsuits, arrests, or federal military forces. Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a neutral and reliable federal government that could intervene early, unite warring sides and prevent bloodshed before it happens, Nam said.
CRS’s first major test came almost immediately during the civil rights protests in Selma in 1965, when mediators helped negotiate a safe passage across the Edmund Pettus Bridge after a violent police crackdown. This reinforced the idea that dialogue and mediation could succeed where force had failed.
After the Bloody Sunday attack in Selma, CRS representatives coordinated with civil rights leaders, the Justice Department, and state officials in what Nam described as “shuttle diplomacy” to negotiate a safe path for the subsequent march across the historic and iconic bridge.
After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, CRS teams also quelled riots in Memphis, Tennessee, maintaining peace in Memphis during civil unrest and riots in more than 100 cities across the United States, according to Department of Justice documents.
Calm in Memphis was due in part to work begun earlier that year, when CRS provided mediation services during the sanitation workers’ strike and met with members of the black community, religious leaders, and gang members to prevent an escalation of violence during the strike. Upon learning of King’s death, CRS mediators urged the assembled crowd to go home and refrain from protests or violence, according to a Justice Department report.
CRS handled all kinds of disputes, including mediating the 1973 “Wounded Knee” conflict between authorities and about 250 members of the American Indian Movement.
Dozens of other efforts followed, including Boston’s school desegregation crisis in the 1970s, the infamous neo-Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977, and efforts in Los Angeles after the police beating of Rodney King and the riots that followed in the early 1990s.
After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, under the direction of Bush administration Attorney General John Ashcroft, CRS teams worked to prevent hate-based retaliation against Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian communities. Ashcroft said CRS has held more than 250 community meetings and trained law enforcement agencies to develop best practices for preventing and responding to hate incidents.
More recently, CRS teams have been deployed across the country to quell escalating conflicts following a series of police killings of Black Americans, including Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2013, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and South Carolina in 2015 after white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine worshipers at the historic African-American Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.
It helped keep the peace between anti-Trump protesters and law enforcement at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
CRS mission ‘inconsistent’ with President Trump’s Justice Department
Before its dissolution in 2025, CRS had 57 employees, approximately 20 of whom were located at the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington and the remainder spread across 30 field offices.
In response to a crisis, CRS deploys small teams or larger groups of up to 15 experts to immediately de-escalate conflicts and come up with long-term solutions that typically become templates used elsewhere.
The agency has been effectively on life support since a March 25, 2025 memo by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that one of the Department of Justice’s priorities would be to “eradicate CRS: eliminate community relations services and transfer some or all affected employees to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”
The Fiscal Year 2026 Budget and Performance Summary released by the Department of Justice on June 13 further stated, “The Department is eliminating the CRS and its functions, totaling 56 positions. The CRS’s mission is inconsistent with the law enforcement and litigation priorities of the Attorney General and the Administration.”
Some employees responded to the Trump administration’s proposed “fork in the road” buyout. Nam and the remaining dozen or so employees received notice of dismissal and resigned in October.
Civil rights groups are suing to force the administration and Congress to reinstate CRS, and the House version of the 2026 budget includes $20 million to do so. Nam said the Senate is expected to vote next week.
“This case is about the executive branch’s efforts to rewrite history in order to dismantle the civil rights institutions established by Congress and cover up the government’s blatantly illegal conduct,” said the plaintiffs, who include NAACP affiliates and the Police Ethics Association, which was founded in 1972 by black police officers to address race-based discrimination.
In response to the lawsuit, the Justice Department said one CRS employee was transferred to another part of the Justice Department and that keeping him there meant the Trump administration was fulfilling its Congressional responsibility to maintain the program.
In its response to the lawsuit, the Justice Department said that since November, its transferred CRS employees have been working with the U.S. Attorney’s Office to ensure a “smooth transition of CRS functions,” including “transferring and preserving CRS operational data and related organizational files,” “identifying steps to complete statutory requirements, establishing milestones, holding court-referred mediation hearings, providing mediation services, and submitting annual reports of CRS activities to Congress.”
Nam accuses the staff of repealing a program created by Congress as bureaucratic accounting fraud.
Nam said she remains hopeful that the program will be revived, but wishes it existed to accommodate the current situation.
“For better or worse, there’s a lot of frustration and anger in the community, and a lot of negative reactions to the federal government’s immigration crackdown,” Nam said. “And as a neutral and impartial peace mediator within the Department of Justice, CRS could have earned the trust of all sides and truly worked to find a workable peaceful solution.”
