Abstract

Excerpted From: Isaac Manchego, The Thin Red Line, 83-AUG Bench & B. Minn. 20 (2026). (Full Document) (59 Footnotes omitted)

The practice of redlining--broadly understood as originating in federal policy and later embedded in banking decisions designed to deny financial services to communities with high minority populations1--predates the Thirteenth Amendment. The abolition of slavery reorganized racial subordination but did not end it, reproducing an ongoing legal condition that preserved systems of control and constraint. Within that framework, redlining emerged as a central mechanism, structuring access to credit, housing, and wealth through federal policy and state-sanctioned lending practices. Redlining was not even made expressly unlawful until the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and even then, the statute left intact many of the structures that made such discrimination predictable and persistent.

Today, redlining has been recognized by federal courts and at least 20 state court systems. And the past few years have seen a few notable initiatives and court cases on the subject. In October 2021, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) announced its Combating Redlining Initiative, representing a robust enforcement effort against discriminatory lending practices. Then U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland described it as “the Department’s most aggressive coordinated enforcement effort to address redlining.” Between 2021 and 2025, the Department of Justice’s Combating Redlining Initiative brought numerous suits against banks and mortgage lenders for discriminatory lending practices targeting majority-Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.5

Last year also saw several high-profile cases and legal developments that brought renewed attention to racial discrimination in mortgage lending. In New York, Saint-Jean v. Emigrant Mortgage Co. involved Black and Latino homeowners who alleged “reverse redlining” because they were targeted with high-interest loans that yielded a high rate of foreclosures. In February 2025, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a jury verdict in favor of the homeowners, affirming that the lender engaged in reverse redlining and violated federal, state, and city antidiscrimination laws. Nationwide, Wells Fargo faced a class action lawsuit alleging racial bias in its CORE automated mortgage system. In August 2025, a federal judge declined to certify the class, requiring plaintiffs to pursue individual claims.

The history of redlining claims in American courts is generally one of failure to identify and apply remedies to discriminatory practices. About a decade ago, as we will see, the Supreme Court finally shifted the focus of redlining jurisprudence from demonstrating “discriminatory intent” (a nearly unprovable standard for practical purposes) to measuring “discriminatory effect.”9

Though anti-redlining enforcement has rarely come to much even in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2015 TDHCA decision, it has been the subject of a concerted rollback effort since the start of the second Trump administration. In 2025, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sought to terminate U.S. Department of Justice settlements and consent decrees related to redlining. In February 2025, simultaneous updates to numerous DOJ webpages that were tracking the Biden-era enforcement cases raised concerns about the Trump administration corrupting and contorting the record and limiting access to court records.58

In another sign of political retrenchment, the American Bankers Association recently published a white paper calling for an end to the disparate impact standard and a return to an intent-based standard. The paper, authored by a former DOJ civil rights attorney, invoked President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14281 (April 2025), entitled Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.59

The legal fiction that redlining is an expired relic of a racist past distorts our common experience; it continues to shape how communities are valued. Tracing the lineage of redlining cases requires confronting law itself as an afterlife of slavery--where racial domination is not merely inherited from the past, but continuously produced in the present through legal practice. Redlining persists not as an abstract condition, but because law actively sustains it: through property doctrine, lending standards, and remedial restraint. These practices do not simply fail to correct racialized dispossession; they give it form, legitimacy, and durability.

Redlining is an important legal subject not only because it persists but because it laid the groundwork for so much of the inequality and economic hardship that continue to plague American cities. It also created an economic foundation for the gentrification that is further destabilizing neighborhoods based on who lives there and how much they earn. This system has shaped how we live, how we think, and how the law is applied.

In turn, it has led to disproportionate surveillance, policing, and state violence aimed at protecting property, targeting people perceived as “out of bounds” and imposing carceral penalties for property crimes or trespassing. Problems such as disparities in property taxes, schools, voting, food deserts, and housing all conform to the maps redlining laid out nearly a century ago.

ISAAC MANCHEGO is a staff attorney at Central Minnesota Legal Services.