The Trump administration is ready to roll back Obama-era policies encouraging colleges to look at race during the admissions process, according to a report Tuesday.
The guidelines, meant to promote diversity, laid out legal recommendations that Trump officials argue go beyond Supreme Court precedent and "mislead schools to believe that legal forms of affirmative action are simpler to achieve than the law allows," The Wall Street Journal reported.
Anurima Bargava, who was in charge of civil rights enforcement in schools at the Justice Department under Obama, told the newspaper that the Trump administration's move appears to be politically motivated.
"The law on this hasn't changed, and the Supreme Court has twice ruled reaffirming the importance of diversity," she said. "This is a purely political attack that benefits nobody."
The move comes as the Justice Department investigates claims that Harvard University is illegally discriminating against Asian-American students.
A lawsuit brought against the Ivy League school in 2014 alleges Harvard discriminates against Asian-American students by limiting the number of Asian students admitted and holding them to higher academic standards.
The Supreme Court has weighed in on the issue several times and allowed schools to use race as a determining factor in the admissions process to promote diversity. In 2016, the court issued a 4-3 ruling that reaffirmed the practice, but Justice Anthony Kennedy allowed that schools must continue to review affirmative action policies in the future.
Kennedy announced his retirement last week, allowing Trump the chance to nominate a more conservative successor.
