President Trump’s Justice Department just widened its civil-rights crackdown on race-based admissions, and this time the target is medicine.
On Thursday, June 4, 2026, the DOJ Civil Rights Division announced fifteen new investigations into potential race discrimination in medical school admissions.
That is not one school. That is fifteen at once.
Each of those schools takes millions of dollars in federal taxpayer money, which means each of them is bound by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The new probes come right after the division announced findings that UCLA and Yale both illegally used race in their medical school admissions.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon made clear where the department stands, particularly when it comes to the doctors of tomorrow.
The Civil Rights Division shared the announcement directly:
Justice Department Expands Admissions Investigations into 15 Additional Medical Schools
“Many of America’s top medical schools appear more concerned about the demographics of their incoming classes than training students to succeed in the profession,” said @AAGDhillon. “Under…
— DOJ Civil Rights Division (@CivilRights) June 4, 2026
The Justice Department laid out the action in its own announcement:
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced today that it opened fifteen new investigations into potential race discrimination in medical school admissions. The Division recently announced its findings that the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and Yale University both illegally used race in medical school admissions.
“Many of America’s top medical schools appear more concerned about the demographics of their incoming classes than training students to succeed in the profession,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
“Under this Justice Department, we will continue to protect American students from discriminatory and illegal preferences in admissions — especially in professions as critical as medicine, where quality of training should be the top priority.”
The Division opened the investigations to enforce compliance with federal law and ensure the students become doctors based on their merit, not their race. Each of the fifteen schools under investigation receives millions of dollars in federal taxpayer funding.
The investigations will examine whether these medical schools follow Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College.
The Civil Rights Division has not reached any conclusions about the subject matter of the investigations.
This is the merit-versus-race fight moving into one of the highest-stakes fields there is.
Nobody wants a surgeon who got the white coat because of a quota.
The legal backbone here is the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which the DOJ release cites as the standard the schools will be measured against.
The Supreme Court put the standard this way in Students for Fair Admissions:
Held: Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. Accordingly, the Court has held that the Equal Protection Clause applies “without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality”—it is “universal in [its] application.”
For “[t]he guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color.”
Respondents’ race-based admissions systems also fail to comply with the Equal Protection Clause’s twin commands that race may never be used as a “negative” and that it may not operate as a stereotype.
Twenty years have passed since Grutter, with no end to race-based college admissions in sight. But the Court has permitted race-based college admissions only within the confines of narrow restrictions: such admissions programs must comply with strict scrutiny, may never use race as a stereotype or negative, and must—at some point—end.
In that case, the Court held that the admissions programs at Harvard and UNC violated equal-protection principles. The era of sorting applicants by skin color was supposed to end there.
The Civil Rights Division says it will examine whether each of the fifteen schools is actually complying with Title VI as the Court interpreted it.
To be fair about it, the DOJ also says it has not reached any conclusions about the new investigations. These are probes, not verdicts, and the department is not naming the fifteen schools.
That caution is the right call. The point is enforcement, not a press-release pile-on.
This also is not coming out of nowhere on the medical side.
The HHS Office for Civil Rights had already put medical schools on notice in writing:
Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office for Civil Rights (OCR) clarified in a “Dear Colleague” letter its interpretation of what constitutes race-based discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI), Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (Section 1557), and the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution.
The interpretation applies not only to student admissions at HHS-funded institutions but also to academic and campus life, including the operations of university hospitals and clinics.
The Dear Colleague letter reinforces that relying on race-based criteria, racial stereotypes, and facially neutral criteria that operates as a pretext for race are all prohibited under Title VI and Section 1557, including when diversity and racial-balancing are the aims. The Department advised medical schools to:
Ensure their policies and procedures comply with existing federal civil rights laws;
Discontinue criteria, tools, or processes that serve as substitutes for race or are intended to advance race-based decision-making; and
End reliance on third-party contractors, clearinghouses, or data aggregators that engage in prohibited uses of race.
Translation: dressing up a racial preference in softer language does not make it legal.
The schools were warned. Now the investigators are showing up.
The same Civil Rights Division had just announced a separate Title VI investigation into Arizona State University one day earlier:
Recent viral videos indicating ASU denied equal treatment to students based on race, color, or national origin — while attempting to hide its discriminatory practices from federal scrutiny — prompted the investigation.
“No student should be denied access to opportunities or… pic.twitter.com/F0qsrIawVO
— DOJ Civil Rights Division (@CivilRights) June 3, 2026
For years the higher-education establishment treated the Supreme Court’s ruling like a suggestion it could quietly work around.
This administration is treating it like the law it is.
Fifteen medical schools just found out that taking federal dollars comes with a federal expectation of equal treatment under the law.
This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.
