In a move decried as “more evidence of backward thinking” by the Trump administration, an internal memo from the Department of Education’s office for civil rights lays out the agency’s plan to roll back investigations into civil rights violations at public schools and diminish Obama-era rules requiring “schools and colleges to overhaul policies addressing a number of civil rights concerns,” the New York Times reported on Friday.

“It’s really a way of curtailing the way civil rights enforcement should be handled.”
—Catherine Lhamon of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

According to the memo, “requirements that investigators broaden their inquiries to identify systemic issues and whole classes of victims will be scaled back,” the Times noted. “Also, regional offices will no longer be required to alert department officials in Washington of all highly sensitive complaints on issues such as the disproportionate disciplining of minority students and the mishandling of sexual assaults on college campuses.”

The directive, first published by ProPublica, was met with outrage from civil rights groups and activists, who portrayed it as part of a larger effort by President Donald Trump to undercut anti-discrimination provisions in public schools and dismantle laws that protect students from gender- and race-based abuse.

“It’s really a way of curtailing the way civil rights enforcement should be handled,” Catherine Lhamon, head of the United States Commission on Civil Rights and former chair of the Education Department’s civil rights office, told the Times, adding that the administration’s proposals are “stunning” and “dangerous.”

“It’s literally a stick your head in the sand approach,” Lhamon concluded.

ProPublica‘s Jessica Huseman and Annie Waldman, bolstering the claims of civil rights advocates, highlighted a pattern of Trump administration actions that appear to be bent on incapacitating agencies responsible for enforcing laws designed to protect minorities from systemic abuses: