A legal group founded by Trump adviser and white nationalist Stephen Miller has requested the justice department investigate “illegal DEI practices” at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
In a letter to the justice department’s civil rights division, America First Legal asked assistant attorney general Harmeet K Dhillon to investigate and issue enforcement actions against the prestigious medical university for embracing “a discriminatory DEI regime as a core institutional mandate”.
The legal complaint accuses Johns Hopkins of “systematically infusing race and other identity-based preferences into medical school admissions, scholarships, faculty hiring, academic curricula, residency programs, and governance.
“Johns Hopkins is not training the next generation of physicians,” the complaint reads. “It is indoctrinating them.”
America First Legal specifically criticized the university’s financial aid program, which began offering full scholarships to all students from families earning less than $300,000 after a $1bn donation from alum Michael Bloomberg in 2024
The complaint alleges: “Johns Hopkins is Using ‘Socioeconomic Status’ as a Proxy for Race-Based Admissions” to circumvent the supreme court’s ruling ending affirmative action.
“Johns Hopkins has constructed a facade of legality around a deeply illegal system. They have replaced explicit race-based admissions with upstream sorting, downstream subsidies, and bureaucratic double-speak designed to preserve racial preferences,” America First Legal attorney Megan Redshaw said in a statement announcing the complaint. “This is not only unlawful under the Constitution and federal civil rights statutes – it has no place in medicine where competence must come first.”
Founded by Miller in 2020, America First Legal focused on advancing a legal agenda for a second Trump administration. As a White House adviser under the first Trump administration, Miller led work on the Muslim travel ban and family separation policy. After Trump lost the 2020 election, Miller launched America First Legal to continue pursuing the administration’s agendas.
It succeeded in winning a 2021 lawsuit blocking implementation of a $29bn Covid-era Small Business Administration program for restaurants owned by women, veterans and people from socially and economically disadvantaged groups; another against CBS and Paramount alleging discrimination against a white, straight man who wrote for the show Seal Team; and a case this year allowing Maryland parents to have their children opt out of lessons using LGBTQ books.
America First Legal addressed its complaint regarding Johns Hopkins directly to Dhillon, head of the justice department’s civil rights division and a conservative attorney known for her lawsuits opposing Covid-19 restrictions and gender-affirming care for minors.
The letter accuses Johns Hopkins of evading the supreme court’s affirmative action ruling by focusing on pathway programs.
The letter alleges: “The use of DEI-based discrimination in medical education isn’t just illegal, it’s especially indefensible. No sector demands greater adherence to merit and objectivity than medicine, where decisions made by physicians can mean the difference between life and death.”
Emerging research shows that diversifying the medical workforce may end racial disparities in healthcare: one 2023 study in the Journal of American Medicine found that Black people in counties with more Black primary care physicians live longer, and guidance from the American Medical Association explains why Native American patients may not trust white doctors.
Only about 5% of US doctors are Black, even though Black Americans make up 14% of the US population. Medical school applications from Black and Hispanic students fell sharply after the supreme court’s affirmative action ruling.
In 2020, Johns Hopkins University announced that its founder owned slaves during the 19th century. At the time, university officials wrote they decided to share the development as part of the school’s effort “to deepen our historical understanding of the legacy of racism in our country, our city, and our institutions”.
America First Legal’s complaint asks the justice department and the Department of Health and Human Services to require Johns Hopkins end all offices, residencies, outreach initiatives, scholarships, admissions pipelines and other programs that focus on race. It also calls for the federal government to suspend funding streams “currently supporting discriminatory practices” and conduct an audit on all funding awarded to the university since 2021.
A major recipient of federal research dollars, Johns Hopkins announced in March that it would cut more than 2,000 jobs after the Trump administration slashed $800m in grants to the administration through the now dismantled US Agency for International Development.
The institution is also currently under investigation alongside nine other elite universities set to be visited by the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism.
