The following is from Judicial Watch.

The Judicial Watch legal team will be in court on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, for a hearing in its class action civil rights lawsuit against Evanston, Illinois. The case, Flinn et al. v. Evanston (No. 1:24-cv-04269), was filed on behalf of six individuals challenging the city’s reparations program.

The court ordered the in-person hearing to hear oral arguments on Evanston’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

Judicial Watch filed the case over the city’s use of race as an eligibility requirement for a reparations program, which awards $25,000 direct cash payments to black residents and descendants of black residents who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969.

The watchdog group argues that the program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In response to Evanston’s motion to dismiss, Judicial Watch maintains that the case should go forward because:

“[T]he program’s use of a race-based eligibility requirement is presumptively unconstitutional, and remedying societal discrimination is not a compelling government interest. Nor has remedying discrimination from as many as 105 years ago or remedying intergenerational discrimination ever been recognized as a compelling government interest. Among the program’s other fatal flaws is that it uses race as a proxy for discrimination without requiring proof of discrimination.”

Judicial Watch states that Evanston’s reparations program is clearly discriminatory and unconstitutional, and that its class action lawsuit should be allowed to proceed.

The group also highlighted several other lawsuits it has filed to challenge what it calls unconstitutional discrimination:

• On January 29, 2024, Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit on behalf of San Francisco taxpayers over a city program that favors biological black and Latino men who identify as women in the distribution of tax money. This came after Judicial Watch forced the release of records showing that San Francisco prioritized funding for black and Latino transgender individuals in its Guaranteed Income for Trans People program. In response, the city approved a settlement agreement, agreeing to pay $3,250 in attorney’s fees and not to recreate a program with the same eligibility criteria.
• In August 2022, Judicial Watch sued Minneapolis Public Schools on behalf of a taxpayer over a teachers’ contract that provided race-based job protections. In January 2025, the Minnesota Supreme Court dismissed the case for lack of standing, without ruling on the constitutionality of the contract.
• In January 2022, the City of Asheville, North Carolina, settled a Judicial Watch lawsuit by agreeing to eliminate racially discriminatory eligibility provisions from a city-funded scholarship and grant program.
• In May 2022, Judicial Watch won a court case challenging California’s gender quota law for corporate boards. The victory came after a 28-day trial, and followed a similar ruling the previous month that found the state’s race, ethnicity, and LGBT quotas unconstitutional.

For more information, read the article here.