This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WBEZ and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

There’s a yellow brick wall covered with hundreds of names tucked inside the Altgeld Gardens public housing project on Chicago’s Far South Side. It’s a memorial to friends and family members in the community who have died, often due to health problems neighbors link to environmental hazards.

“People just started putting up names on the wall for the people who died of cancer and other respiratory problems,” said Cheryl Johnson, who runs the nonprofit People for Community Recovery. She was leading reporters during an Earth Day tour of the public housing complex, which is wedged between toxic landfills, old steel mills, chemical factories and a BP oil refinery.

Rich Cahan/For WBEZ

Environmental justice was born at Altgeld Gardens. Johnson’s mother, Hazel Johnson, started the nonprofit she now runs and is celebrated as “the mother of the environmental justice movement.” Her lifelong fight to make public officials confront how poor, Black and Latino communities face disproportionate exposure to pollution turned the “Gardens” into a launchpad for the national campaign. When President Bill Clinton signed the first executive order recognizing “environmental justice” in 1994, Hazel Johnson was standing right next to him.

Now, 30 years later, her legacy is under siege. President Donald Trump struck down Clinton’s executive order during his first week in office. In the 100 days since, along with a plan to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion measures, the Trump administration is pushing to dismantle environmental justice protections and programs across the United States.

Changes have included an emergency order making it easier to fast-track fossil fuel projects while sidelining community opposition, challenges to congressionally appropriated funding for climate and environmental initiatives, elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and deep cuts to the federal workforce responsible for protecting communities from pollution.

According to Debbie Chizewer, an attorney with the nonprofit environmental legal group Earthjustice, the administration’s message to environmental justice communities is loud and clear: “We’re not going to do this work anymore.”

Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco/WBEZ

Chizewer added that the Trump administration isn’t just making it harder for the federal government to respond to environmental racism, but also for communities to advocate for themselves.

The White House is targeting bedrock protections, going after Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin under any programs that receive federal funding.

In the past, environmental justice groups fighting industrial pollution have used the provision to get the federal government to intervene in local issues. In Chicago, for example, Cheryl Johnson was part of a civil rights complaint that resulted in a 2023 settlement agreement requiring the city of Chicago to fix zoning policies that concentrated heavy industry in poor and minority communities.

The national success of the legal tool may be fleeting.

Earlier this month, Trump’s Department of Justice terminated another 2023 settlement agreement that required Alabama to update a failing septic system that released raw sewage onto lawns in that state’s Lowndes County. The Justice Department said it was ending the settlement as part of its mandate to end “Illegal DEI and Environmental Justice Policies.”

“The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a press release.

“I was not surprised,” given the Trump administration’s track record, said Catherine Colman Flowers, a Lowndes County environmental justice activist who helped file the complaint that secured the 2023 settlement. Alabama’s Department of Public Health agreed to continue funding the septic replacement program until funds run out.

Long term, Colman Flowers said scrapping the settlement means “a lot of families will not get sanitation and will still be living in America with sewage on the ground.”

The ongoing silencing is increasingly evident in the Great Lakes region, where Trump’s “national energy emergency” has fast-tracked federal review of the controversial Great Lakes Tunnel, a massive fossil fuel project that would replace a segment of the Line 5 pipeline, which crosses the Straits of Mackinac separating Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.

Nearby Indigenous communities have voiced concern for years that any potential leaks from the proposed pipeline tunnel, which is projected to traverse their lands, could irrevocably impact their life on the Great Lakes.

“There is no national emergency” for energy, said Whitney Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, noting that the United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. Critics of the project maintain that only about 10% of the natural gas products that run through Line 5 stays in Michigan; the overwhelming majority continues back to Canada.

“To see it steamrolled ahead effectively silences the tribes vocalizing their concerns or sharing any of that reasoning with the decision-makers,” said Gravelle.

Meanwhile, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin invited industrial polluters to seek exemptions from federal rules on air pollution, a move Ana Baptista, an environmental policy professor at The New School in New York, called “a cue to industries that they have free reign.”

Trump will then decide whether heavy industry, often located near environmental justice communities, will be able to leapfrog standards for toxic pollutants like mercury, arsenic and ethylene oxide.

“It feels like we’re going back to the era where people denied the existence of environmental injustice and communities were really on their own,” Baptista said. The only difference now, she added, is that there’s more than 30 years of evidence documenting how poor and minority communities bear the brunt of pollution and its dangerous health effects.

Back on Chicago’s South Side, Mayor Brandon Johnson surveyed the Altgeld Gardens Memorial Wall, calling it a potent reminder that the ultimate goal of any good policy is “to create equal environmental protection for everyone.”

In April, Mayor Johnson introduced an ordinance named after Hazel Johnson that would require the city to investigate the pollution impacts of new industrial projects before approving them.

“Even with the attacks coming from the federal government, we’re going to do everything in Chicago to protect working people,” he said. “It also is an effort to double down in our work to ensure that environmental justice prevails.”