With more than1,000 protests planned nationwide for Jan. 10 and Jan. 11amid heightened tensions over two recentshootings by federal immigration enforcement agents, this might seem like a good opportunity for the Justice Department to deploy its "peacemaking" unit that for decades de-escalated confrontations at demonstrations and helped prevent deadly police responses.
But it can't, because the Trump administration shut down 57-person Community Relations Service unit last October.
The department had previously touted CRS since its 1964 founding for successfully coordinating communication 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 "Bloody Sunday" police attack on civil rights marchers and the protests and riots that followed the 2020 police murder of George Floyd.
"It's very frustrating, because I know that CRS could add immediate value to peacemaking efforts in Minneapolis and in other places throughout the country," said Julius Nam, the former senior Justice Department official who ran the unit until he was given a Reduction in Force (layoff) notice last Sept. 29.
Vigils held for woman killed in ICE related shooting in Minneapolis
The unit shut down with Nam's layoff, and shuttered its 30 field offices spread across the United States, as DOJ said its "mission does not comport" with its "law enforcement and litigating priorities."
Six years ago, CRS specialists deployed to Minneapolis to defuse the intensifying police-protester clashes after anofficer knelt on Floyd's neckuntil he was dead. That occurred just a few blocks from where a federal ICE agentshot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Goodon Jan. 7 during a confrontation over her vehicle being in the middle of the street.
Good's slaying hasprompted protests around the country, after the Trump administration and Department of Homeland Security said ICE agent Jonathan Ross was acting in self-defense.
More:'We had whistles. They had guns': Renee Nicole Good's wife speaks out
Viral videos of the incidentshow Ross fired at least twoof the three shots that struck Good from the side of her vehicle as she was pulling away.
Subsequent tense interactions with law enforcement have been captured on video, such as one in which aDHS officer deliberately kicked overa candle placed at a memorial for Good.
On Jan. 8,Border Patrol agents shottwo people during an attempted traffic stop in Portland, Oregon.
AfterFloyd's murder, CRS specialists held weekly virtual meetings and frequent in-person convenings that led to city, law enforcement and community leaders identifying steps for reducing conflict. It also led to an updated Memorandum of Understanding between law enforcement and community groups to deter future riots and dangerous police use of force.
"I know CRS could have de-escalated the violence that is already happening, and that is likely to spread even more," Nam, who was a Justice Department civil rights prosecutor before running CRS, said of the current conflict.
Olivia Troye, a White House homeland security official in the first Trump administration, told USA TODAY the CRS "exists for moments exactly like this."
"After a federal shooting like what's happened in Minnesota, CRS should be helping to de-escalate tensions and rebuild trust in the community, but that capacity was deliberately weakened," said Troye, who has since become a vocal critic of Trump. "CRS exists to insert accountability before confrontation. It creates space for facts to surface, grievances to be heard, and restraint. Without it, the federal government is left policing its own actions in real time, while communities are left with protest or silence as their only options."
Criminologist and civil rights attorney Brian Levin said CRS's shutdown deprives the country of an effective program to defuse the political violence that has skyrocketed in recent years.
"The Community Relations Service, a jewel of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, has been all but obliterated, other than some religion cases, by the apparent application of the President's Executive order," Levin, the founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, told USA TODAY.
Asha Rangappa, a Yale University senior lecturer and former FBI special agent, said one of CRS's most important contributions was in building trust between local communities, police and federal law enforcement. Its work, she said, "is like the bread and butter of (law enforcement) creating relationships with communities."
"And a part of that is because it is useful for investigations" into crimes committed by anyone involved, especially those in positions of authority, like police involved in fatal shootings, Rangappa said. "You need to have the trust of the people, because you need them to provide information. And I think that's a really, really important component of what the DOJ does."
In response to questions about the closure of CRS, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told USA TODAY that ICE officers in Minneapolis and elsewhere "have conducted themselves with the utmost professionalism to help make American communities safer."
"Left-wing agitators don't need mediators, they need to follow the law," Jackson said, while declining to comment on CRS. "Interfering with law enforcement operations is a crime and anyone doing so will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law."
What was DOJ's Community Relations Service?
The CRS was established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after Congress concluded that it needed to come to grips with the increasingly violent clashes over civil rights enforcement. School desegregation, voting rights and public-accommodation battles – especially across the South – had led to shootings and beatings of African Americans by white counterprotesters and police.
Congress concluded that not all civil-rights crises could be solved by lawsuits, arrests, or federal force. Lawmakers – and President Lyndon B. Johnson – called for a neutral, trusted federal presence that could step in early, bring opposing sides together and prevent bloodshed before it happened, Nam said.
CRS's first major test came almost immediately, during the Civil Rights marches in Selma in 1965, when conciliators helped negotiate a safe path forward across the Edmund Pettus Bridge after violent police crackdowns. That cemented 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," and negotiated a safe path for the subsequent marches over the historically symbolic bridge.
CRS teams also defused the riots in Memphis, Tennessee, after the April 4, 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., keeping the peace there while more than 100 cities across the United States saw civil disorder and rioting,according to DOJ documents.
Memphis remained peaceful due in part to the work that began earlier that year when CRS provided conciliation services during a 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 addressed the crowd that gathered encouraged them to go home and refrain from protesting or committing acts of violence,a DOJ report said.
CRS handled conflicts of all kinds, including mediating the "Wounded Knee" standoff of 1973 between authorities and about 250 members of the American Indian Movement.
Dozens of other efforts followed, including during the Boston school desegregation crisis in the 1970s, during the infamousneo-Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977 and in Los Angeles in the early 1990s following the Rodney King police beating and the subsequent riots.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, CRS teams under the direction of Bush administration Attorney General John Ashcroft worked to prevent hate-based retaliation against Arab, Muslim, Sikh and South Asian communities. Ashcroft saidCRS held more than 250community meetings, trained law enforcement in developing best practices for preventing and responding to hate incidents.
More recently, CRS teams deployed around the country to de-escalate conflicts after a series of police killings of Black Americans, includingTrayvon Martin in Floridain 2013,Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and in South Carolina in 2015 after white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine people worshipping in Charleston's historically African American Mother Emanuel AME Church.
In 2024, it helped keep the peace between anti-Trump protesters and law enforcement at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
CRS mission 'does not comport' with Trump's DOJ
Before it was dismantled in 2025, CRS had 57 employees, with about 20 at DOJ headquarters in Washington and the rest spread across its 30 field offices.
Depending on the crisis, CRS deployed small teams or larger groups of up to 15 specialists to immediately de-escalate conflicts and come up with long-term solutions that usually became templates to be used elsewhere.
The agency was effectively on life support aftera March 25, 2025 memoby Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced as one of DOJ's priorities, "Eliminating CRS: eliminating the Community Relations Service and moving some or all impacted employees to U.S. Attorneys' Offices."
A June 13 Justice Department "FY 2026 Budget and Performance Summary" went further: "The Department will eliminate CRS and its functions, a total of 56 positions. The CRS mission does not comport with Attorney General and Administration law enforcement and litigating priorities."
Some employees took "fork in the road" buyoutsoffered by the Trump administration. Nam and the dozen or so who stayed on received layoff notices and left in October.
Civil rights groupshave sued to force the administrationand Congress to restore CRS, and a House version of the 2026 budget includes $20 million for it. Nam said the Senate is expected to vote as early as next week.
"This case concerns the Executive Branch's efforts to dismantle a congressionally-created civil rights agency and then rewrite history to hide the government's nakedly unlawful actions," said the plaintiffs, including NAACP affiliates and the Ethical Society of Police, an organization 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 elsewhere within DOJ and that keeping that person at DOJ means the Trump administration is meeting its congressional mandate to maintain the program.
In aresponse to the lawsuit, DOJ said that since November, that transferred CRS employee has worked with the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys "to ensure a smooth transition of CRS functions," including "transferring and housing CRS operational data and relevant organizational files" and "identifying steps and establishing milestones to complete the Department's statutory requirements, to hold any court referred mediation hearings, offer conciliation services, and submit an annual report of CRS activities to Congress."
Nam calls the actions of that one employee bureaucratic window-dressing to paper over the elimination of a program created by Congress.
While Nam keeps hope alive that the program will be restored, he says he wishes it could be there to respond to the current situation.
"There's a lot of frustration, a lot of anger, that communities have, rightly or wrongly – a lot of negative reaction to the federal government's immigration enforcement," Nam said. "And as a neutral, impartial peacemaking body within DOJ, CRS could have really engaged, with trust from all sides, to find workable, peaceful solutions."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Trump administration killed DOJ unit for defusing police protests
