Late Tuesday afternoon (July 3), as most of Washington, D.C. was headed out of the office to celebrate the US’s Independence Day holiday, the Department of Justice issued a curious list.
Late Tuesday afternoon (July 3), as most of Washington, D.C. was headed out of the office to celebrate the US’s Independence Day holiday, the Department of Justice issued a curious list.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinds “24 Guidance Documents,” the DOJ’s 4pm press release said, adding that Sessions was “rescinding 24 guidance documents that were unnecessary, outdated, inconsistent with existing law, or otherwise improper.” Sessions blamed “previous administrations,” for trying to “impose new rules on the American people without any public notice or comment period, simply by sending a letter or posting a guidance document on a website.”
Among other things, these documents provide guidance to homeowners, school admissions offices, law enforcement, and small businesses. They include an explanation of what a Supreme Court decision on racial diversity means to schools, an informal guide to preventing employment discrimination, and even a mortgage guide for homebuyers that encourages them to “shop, compare, negotiate!” The first seven refer to how juveniles should be treated by courts and in detention facilities.
This isn’t the first time Sessions has deleted guidelines issued by previous justice departments. Last December, he purged a trove of legal advice including a Ronald Reagan-era notice saying it was illegal to ship certain guns across state lines, part of his stated policy to purge what Sessions called “defacto regulations.”
The Department of Justice has already removed most of the items completely from its website, and there’s no longer even a historical record of what they said on US government websites. Quartz has downloaded copies of these documents from elsewhere and linked to them (with the help of the Campaign for Youth Justice, which supplied the first six items). Here’s the list:
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