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Trump’s Rollback of Environmental Justice Policies Endangers Frontline Communities Already Struggling with Pollution 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — This week, President Donald Trump repealed a 1994 executive order that protected low-income and minority communities from adverse health or environmental effects of industry. Additionally, Trump disbanded the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, intended to focus on environmental justice issues across the federal government. In response, Tracey Lewis, senior policy counsel with Public Citizen’s Climate Program, issued the following statement:

“The Trump Administration has made clear that his government is not of the people, for the people or by the people — it is a government intent on harming the American people. Not since Woodrow Wilson have we seen an American president so zealously focused on stripping American people of their civil rights. Trump’s flurry of first-day executive orders rolling back federal protections, including the Clinton-era environmental justice Executive Order 12898 and the 1994 Clinton EO, reveals his complete hostility to environmental and health protections for Americans of low income or minority status, especially when they interfere with corporate profits.

“Americans know that we are better off as a nation when we look out for each other — this is how we have made progress towards racial and economic justice in the last 160 years. But the Trump administration intends to divide America into the haves and have nots—those whom the government serves and those whom he proclaims it shall not.

“Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends towards justice. Sadly, Trump intends to bend it backwards towards injustice, resegregation, pollution, and death.”