Just days ahead of the five-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, President Trump's administration has announced it will drop investigations into the Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky., police departments. 

The Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it has begun the process of dismissing Biden-era lawsuits that accused Louisville and Minneapolis of widespread patterns of unconstitutional policing practices and will retract any findings of constitutional violations from the previous Justice Department (DOJ).

The investigations were spurred by the police killings of Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville. The 2020 killings of the two Black Americans by white police officers — just two months apart — sparked nationwide protests. 

The Justice Department said that in dismissing these cases, any consent decrees put forth by the Biden administration would no longer apply to the police departments.

“Overbroad police consent decrees divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs, turning that power over to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, often with an anti-police agenda,”  Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. “Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”

Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department found Minneapolis and Louisville police departments had a pattern of using excessive force and unlawfully discriminating against Black and Native Americans, among other violations.

The probes provided guidance — or consent decrees — on police reform to rectify civil rights violations that the DOJ uncovered. If approved by a federal judge, an independent monitor would be assigned to oversee the implementation of the reforms and actions.

But the Trump DOJ said the consent decrees “went far beyond the Biden administration’s accusations of unconstitutional conduct” and “would have imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so.” 

The DOJ’s dismissal will also close its investigations and retract the Biden administration’s findings of constitutional violations in Phoenix; Trenton, N.J.; Memphis, Tenn.; Mount Vernon, N.Y.; Oklahoma City; and related to the Louisiana State Police. 

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who was heavily involved in leading protests, sermons and supporting the families of both Floyd and Taylor, as well as Tyre Nichols in Tennessee in 2023, said the DOJ’s decision shouldn’t come as a surprise, “but it’s a giant stumble backward in the journey toward justice” for Floyd, Taylor and the “countless” other Black and brown men and women who have been killed by police.

“This move isn’t just a policy reversal. It’s a moral retreat that sends a chilling message that accountability is optional when it comes to Black and Brown victims,” Sharpton said in a statement to The Hill.  

“Trump’s decision to dismiss these lawsuits with prejudice solidifies a dangerous political precedent that police departments are above scrutiny, even when they’ve clearly demonstrated a failure to protect the communities they’re sworn to serve.”

Sharpton added that, since the height of the Civil Rights Movement, presidents of both parties have used consent decrees to address unconstitutional practices at the local level. 

“Trump is shamelessly weaponizing the Justice Department against marginalized communities,” Sharpton said. 

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Minnesota also condemned the DOJ's decision. 

“While the ACLU of Minnesota is deeply disappointed in the DOJ’s decision to back out of this consent decree five years after the murder of George Floyd, this decision does not mean that MPD will be free to violate the rights of Minnesotans with impunity,” said Deepinder Singh Mayell, executive director of the ACLU of Minnesota. 

“The city must still abide by the state-level consent decree. MPD is also on notice that their officers engaged in unconstitutional policing for years, which makes it easier to hold the MPD liable for any future violations down the road. Now is the time to follow through: not just with promises, but with real action to fix what is so clearly broken.”

Rebecca Beitsch contributed.