The fate of the country’s first taxpayer-funded reparations program is hanging in the air after the city in question, Evanston, Illinois, defended its program and asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit that argues the race-based payments are unconstitutional. 

At issue is whether Evanston’s first-of-its-kind reparations effort — for which the city allocated $20 million for a program to provide $25,000 payments to Black people who lived at Evanston between 1919 and 1969 and their descendants — violates the Equal Protection Clause. Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit earlier this year, claiming that its six plaintiffs would be eligible for the reparations payments except for the fact that they weren’t Black.

Evanston, in a legal filing this week, doubled down on its earlier claims that the plaintiffs don’t have legal standing and that the lawsuit is untimely. The city urged the judge to dismiss the lawsuit because the court “is not a proper forum for Plaintiffs to address their untimely policy disagreement” with the city’s reparations program. “This Court may only resolve timely-filed cases where the plaintiff has a concrete and particularized injury,” Evanston argues, adding that the plaintiffs lack standing because they were not “able and ready” to apply for the program back in 2021, when the city last accepted applications.  

“The argument’s ridiculous, I mean there’s no pushback that’s credible on our clients being eligible for this program, other than for their race,” the president of Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton, tells the Sun. “What the city’s trying to do, the trick they’re trying to pull is to avoid litigating the merits so that they can engage in racist reparations and make it impossible for anyone to challenge it. And, you know, we’re hopeful the court rejects that.” 

Now that the court’s been fully briefed, he says the next step is to wait for the judge, John Kness of the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, to make a decision. Asked if Judicial Watch would appeal the case if the judge dismisses it, Mr. Fitton says that “it depends” but that ordinarily the group would at least consider an appeal.

Evanston’s latest legal filing “is a lot of noise,” Mr. Fitton says, “but in the end it doesn’t address the issues of why our clients can’t apply because of the color of their skin.” 

A major question surrounding reparations payments is how to prevent fraud and determine eligibility by ensuring applicants are actually Black. While many city and state reparations commissions are still in the early stages and haven’t yet detailed eligibility criteria, some have suggested DNA testing to determine lineage. San Francisco’s reparations commission has advocated for funding for “genealogy research and DNA testing” in its reparations recommendations. 

Evanston, which has paid out more than $5 million in reparations so far, has been quiet regarding how it goes about verifying that recipients are Black. The city’s website says that Black or African American people are “persons having origins in any of the Black racial and ethnic groups of Africa.” A representative of the city, when asked by the Sun about the lawsuit and how the city goes about verifying eligibility, declined to comment, citing pending litigation.