DEI Officers Claim Trump Orders Threaten Free Speech in New Suit

President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting allegedly discriminatory DEI programs in business, higher education, and elsewhere should be blocked for infringing on First Amendment and due process rights, a group of challengers said in a new federal lawsuit.

Groups representing university diversity officers, college professors, and restaurant workers, along with Baltimore city officials, sued Trump and multiple federal agencies Monday in the US District Court for the District of Maryland.

They claim a pair of executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are so broad and overly vague that they chill the plaintiffs’ free speech under threat of both civil investigations and loss of federal funding if the Trump administration deems their DEI efforts to be illegal.

The lawsuit is one of the first to directly target Trump’s new DEI-focused orders. It adds to mounting legal challenges to early second-term Trump actions, such as his order to eliminate “birthright citizenship” for children born in the US to immigrant parents who are unauthorized or without permanent residency, and steps taken by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”

Trump’s private-sector DEI order issued Jan. 21 called on the US attorney general and federal agencies to identify the “most egregious and discriminatory DEI practitioners in each sector of concern.” It also mandated that federal contractors certify they don’t have DEI policies that conflict with the administration’s interpretation of civil rights laws.

The DEI order’s vagueness only serves to amplify its chilling effect on speech, according to the complaint.

“The undefined terms leave potential targets with no anchor as to what speech or which actions the order encompasses. They also give executive branch officials like the Attorney General carte blanche authority to implement the order discriminatorily,” the plaintiffs said.

Trump’s order also stripped authority from the US Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs to combat discrimination and enforce affirmative action policies among federal contractors.

The order’s language focuses more on preferential treatment in decisions such as hiring and promotions, rather than prohibiting discussion of particular DEI-related concepts as Trump attempted to do in a 2020 executive order. A federal judge partially blocked that earlier order in December 2020 on First Amendment and due-process grounds, shortly before President Joe Biden took office and rescinded it.

A White House spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday’s lawsuit.

The legal advocacy group Democracy Forward represents the plaintiffs—the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, the American Association of University Professors, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, and the mayor and city council of Baltimore.

The case is Nat’l Assoc. of Diversity Officers in Higher Educ. v. Trump, D. Md., No. 1:25-cv-00333, 2/3/25