FORT DEPOSIT, Ala. — In a visit to her childhood home, Gabrielle McPherson points out its sagging floors and a cracked roof in the laundry room. It is in need of significant repairs, but her family’s biggest concern is the plumbing.
This house is one of many in this Lowndes County neighborhood that pumps untreated raw sewage into the environment through a process known as straight piping, which sometimes results in pools of it building up on residents’ lawns. The yard occasionally produces a strong, unbearable odor that intensifies during the summer. It’s common for sinks and toilets to clog when it rains.
The decades-long problem has drawn nationwide attention for its health risks, and residents of this predominantly Black, rural county don’t trust that the problem is getting better anytime soon.
Recently, the Trump administration said it was terminating the federal government’s settlement with local officials to address the issue, adding that it was a decision taken to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting “environmental justice” efforts.
In Lowndes County, news of the terminated agreement with the federal government to help them fix their wastewater problems hadn’t reached McPherson when NOTUS asked her about it. But she believes that removing it will hurt the county.
“A lot of people get in certain positions and they use it to their benefit, not to help,” McPherson said in response to the administration’s anti-DEI justification for terminating the agreement. “As long as it’s helping them, they say they’re going to do this and they’re going to do that … like I said, this has been years.”
Lowndes County is one of hundreds of places with environmental health problems that the Biden administration identified as needing “environmental justice” solutions. In Nanjemoy, Maryland, residents often don’t have access to safe drinking water; in Pocatello, Idaho, sewage has occasionally flooded out of manholes; the Kugkaktlik River is close to spilling past its eroding embankment and flooding fuel tanks in Kipnuk, Alaska.
Communities and groups like these and Lowndes County were among the thousands to apply for funding to address long-standing problems through the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental and Justice and External Civil Rights. The idea promoted by the Biden administration was that the poorest and most historically underfunded communities with long-standing pollution issues should be prioritized for receiving federal government assistance.
In the case of Lowndes County, the EPA awarded $14.4 million to Texas A&M University and the Black Belt Unincorporated Wastewater Program to build wastewater treatment solutions for 350 homes and create a training program for wastewater professionals.
But the Trump administration is planning on terminating the grants awarded through this program, as well as many other environmental justice grant programs from the EPA, according to an April 23 court filing. The EPA declined to comment on questions about this award.
“One of the biggest things we were trying to do was address the fact that there are communities that live across the United States that live in realities completely different from the rest of us. … They know that when they flush their toilets, it’s going to go into the stream where their kids play or into their backyard, like in Lowndes County,” said Matthew Tejada, who served as a key environmental justice administrator at the EPA during Joe Biden’s tenure as president.
“In the case of Lowndes, we were finally starting to see the government really recognize its responsibility to the people of that part of the country and to hold ourselves accountable to it,” he said.
But now, Lowndes County represents something else: the uncertainty that exists for people in a world where Trump and his cabinet have a knee-jerk reaction to anything labeled “environmental justice.”
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In Trump’s first week in office, he signed an executive order calling for the removal of all “environmental justice” initiatives throughout the federal government. Agencies began to pull web pages that referenced the phrase, freeze grant disbursements and remove data tools, including the EPA’s mapping tool that overlaid demographic and environmental health data to indicate the most underserved areas facing disproportionate pollution.
The EPA has fired or reassigned hundreds of staffers assigned to work on related issues, closed the 10 regional environmental justice offices, and announced its plans to terminate the grant programs. The Justice Department has suspended some key environmental leaders, reassigned lawyers and changed policy directives to put an end to environmental justice efforts.
The DOJ on April 11 terminated the settlement with the state on handling wastewater issues in Lowndes County, after weeks of changes at the agency that involved removing and reassigning attorneys working on environmental justice prosecutions. The administration also indicated they would not be pursuing any other investigations into environmental justice issues.
“Today’s closure is another step this Administration has taken to eradicate illegal DEI preferences and environmental justice across the government and in the private sector. The Department is working quickly to close such cases in compliance with the Attorney General’s directive,” the DOJ said in the announcement of the reversal.
The DOJ did not respond to additional questions from NOTUS.
Across the administration, members of Trump’s cabinet speak about “environmental justice” as a form of discrimination and as a tool to funnel money to Democratic-aligned groups.
“As Administrator Zeldin has repeatedly stressed, ‘environmental justice’ has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activist groups instead of actually spending those dollars on directly remediating the specific environmental issues that need to be addressed. The Trump EPA is focused on provide clean air, land, and water for every American regardless of race, gender, creed, and background,” an EPA spokesperson said in response to questions from NOTUS.
In terminating the agreement with Alabama, the DOJ was undoing years of work to address the sewage issues — and years of trying to build trust with the community.
One problem the Biden administration had to overcome was that Alabama had long fined residents who straight piped. In the past, residents had reportedly been arrested and jailed for not having septic systems and for straight piping. In addition, a 2019 state law allowed the Alabama Department of Public Health to install a septic system in residents’ homes and put a lien on their property to get the money back. The department previously said it’s not going to go back to issuing citations and fines to residents for sanitation issues.
“A lot of people that were having those same issues didn’t speak out before because of fear of, ‘I don’t want to be cited,’” Stephaine Wallace, a Lowndes County resident and project manager for the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, told NOTUS. “Once that agreement was put in place, OK, now I’ll let you know. Yes, I need help, I’m straight piping or I have a system that’s failing and I can’t afford to fix it.”
Wallace said she is now hopeful that the state health department “honors” its promise not to return to fining, as it would “look just as bad as Trump” if it reneged.
The closing of regional environmental justice offices, including the one that represents Alabama, will likely decrease the EPA’s abilities to listen to the on-the-ground needs of communities like those in Lowndes County, multiple former Biden administration officials told NOTUS.
“The office for environmental justice comes from the fact that many communities were left out of the decision-making. And so at its core, it’s the arm that is community-based and community-led, and it’s the group of people that create those relationships on the ground,” said Lisa Garcia, an EPA regional administrator for the mid-Atlantic and Puerto Rico during the Biden administration. “They lead this community-based, very localized solution to an environmental problem.”
Biden embedded the concept of “environmental justice” throughout his agencies, giving the EPA new technical assistance centers aimed to help these communities with infrastructure issues, prioritizing funds from the Inflation Reduction Act for these communities and even directing the Justice Department to focus its prosecutions of environmental crimes on the most historically underfunded places.
As part of accepting the settlement, Biden’s DOJ agreed to pause its investigation into the Alabama Department of Public Health for civil rights violations. At the time, state health officer Scott Harris approved of the agreement, but disputed that the Alabama Department of Public Health neglected the problem.
But even then the people in Lowndes County had questions about what exactly that would mean for them down the road.
“When the EPA came, that was one of the questions that I asked,” Delmartre Bethel, the mayor of White Hall, Alabama, told NOTUS. “‘If the Biden-Harris administration did not come back in office, where did it kind of leave the town?’ [I] was unable to get a clear and definite answer. So when it comes to kind of working on some of the issues that we’ve had in the past with this administration, I’m not too hopeful that we’ll be able to kind of get something accomplished.”
Rep. Terri Sewell, who represents Lowndes County and held a town hall there last week, told NOTUS that the difference between the past and current administrations is clear on the ground.
“This administration’s total attack on diversity, equity and inclusion has made them less amenable to even acknowledge environmental injustices, even though they were documented by the previous administration,” Sewell said. “And so it’s a struggle.”
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Under the Biden-era agreement, Alabama committed to taking steps to provide Lowndes County residents with an adequate sewage system. The state’s department of health agreed to contracts, one of which specifically serves Lowndes County residents, to install new septic systems. Those contracts run through December 2026.
Ron Dawsey, the director of the Bureau of Environmental Services at the Alabama Department of Public Health, told NOTUS that Alabama plans to abide by those contracts “as long as we have appropriated funding” from Congress, even with the agreement lifted.
Geraldine McPherson, a relative of Gabrielle’s who lives in a neighborhood seven miles from Gabrielle’s parents, was able to get her septic tank replaced free of charge in November because she was considered a top priority under the previous administration’s guidance. Before that, she said sewage was coming up into her backyard, too. Geraldine now worries that the termination of the state health department’s contract with the DOJ could make others worried about reaching out for help.
“They don’t think Trump is any good,” Geraldine said about Lowndes County residents. “And they think he’s not for the poor people. He’s for the rich and he’s not going to do anything to help us. Like I said, it’s really getting rough out here as far as people reaching out for help.”
There’s split opinion among residents about whether sewage issues will now get worse, but even the head of the county’s Republican party called the decision to reverse course “disappointing.”
“I mean, hopefully the education and awareness about it, we’re not gonna get worse,” said Rick Pate, Lowndes County GOP chair. “I mean, it’s gonna certainly slow down making it better.”
Some Democrats are holding off judgement on the effect that canceling the agreement will have. Catherine Coleman Flowers, the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice who served on Biden’s White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, told NOTUS that she’s “waiting to see” if this Trump administration provides remedies for Lowndes County and other neighboring counties with similar problems.
In 2024, the Lowndes County Unincorporated Wastewater Program received $1.5 million from the Alabama Department of Public Health to install septic systems. Carmelita Arnold, the group’s president, told NOTUS that money would only be enough for 60 households and that each system costs on average “$20,000 a piece to install.”
She said the agreement’s termination would only contribute to more residents feeling uncomfortable to say they need assistance.
“The septic problem has existed for so long in Lowndes County, and so many people and so much money has come into and come out without a solution, a lot of the residents feel betrayed,” Arnold said.
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Torrence Banks is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.