Court Permanently Blocks Environmental Civil Rights Protections For Black Communities In Louisiana

EarthJustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, said the ruling gives companies carte blanche to pollute predominantly Black and Latinx communities in Louisiana.

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana has issued a permanent injunction barring the EPA and the Department of Justice from using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to influence Louisiana’s regulation of polluting facilities.

According to the Louisiana Illuminator, James Cain, an appointee of former president Donald Trump, issued a permanent injunction against both the Department of Justice and the EPA, blocking the entities from controlling how the State of Louisiana regulates pollution.

EarthJustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, said in a statement that the ruling essentially gives companies that pollute in predominantly Black and Latinx communities carte blanche to poison those communities.

“Louisiana has given industrial polluters open license to poison Black and brown communities for generations, only to now have one court give it a permanent free pass to abandon its responsibilities,” Patrice Simms, EarthJustice’s vice president for healthy communities, said. “Louisiana’s residents, its environmental justice communities, deserve the same Title VI protections as the rest of the nation.”

The EPA, meanwhile, released a statement expressing that both it and the DOJ would continue to enforce civil rights law in accordance with the court’s order.

According to Grist, the EPA did not attempt to resolve most of the complaints it received from the organization’s inception in 1970 until 2015 when EarthJustice sued them for that practice and won.

In 2020, after President Joe Biden won the election, the EPA’s federal regulators finally resolved some complaints and announced an investigation into Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, a predominantly Black swath of land stretching from the lower Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, containing over 150 chemical plants that pump carcinogens into the air.

The federal government had begun making some significant progress with Louisiana officials, that is, until then-Louisiana Attorney General and current Gov. Jeff Landry sued the EPA to block it from pursuing their disparate impacts, which Cain agreed with.

According to Debbie Chizewer, an attorney at EarthJustice, the EPA and the DOJ could choose to appeal the ruling and cautioned that were another court to be petitioned using Landry’s theoretical argument, “if another state filed a case using the same theories, they will point to this case as persuasive authority for another court to consider.”