A conservative legal group founded by a member of the Trump administration has filed a complaint to the U.S. Department of Justice against the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, alleging racial discrimination.

America First Legal, founded and run by Trump advisor Stephen Miller, filed the complaint Thursday alleging that the Hopkins’ medical school is discriminating against certain racial groups by promoting policies related to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Though not a household name, America First Legal has won numerous victories in the courts since its 2020 founding, including in the recent case over giving parents the ability to have their child opt out of lessons using LGBTQIA+ books in Montgomery County public schools. The group was also behind the recent resignation of University of Virginia President Jim Ryan.

Since President Donald Trump has returned to the Oval Office, the legal organization has seen a drastic increase in its influence and reach, serving as an “attack dog” for the Trump administration.

“Johns Hopkins has not merely preserved its discriminatory DEI framework — it has entrenched, expanded and openly celebrated it as a cornerstone of its institutional identity,” the 37 page complaint reads. “DEI is a governing ideology at Johns Hopkins, not a passive ideal.”

Though it focused on the medical school, the complaint left room for the conservative group to keep attacking the university itself.

“Evidence from Johns Hopkins’ institutional reporting confirms that its race-based admissions practices are neither incidental nor limited to the School of Medicine — they are part of a comprehensive, university-wide regime of racial engineering,” the document reads.

Representatives for Johns Hopkins and its medical school did not respond to requests for comment.

The complaint was addressed to Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and asks that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights open investigations, as well.

The group is also asking that the federal government require Hopkins to dismantle all of its DEI-related offices, committees, working groups and advisory boards and has requested a formal, written certification from university President Ron Daniels promising full compliance with federal civil rights laws and executive orders.

Additionally, the group is seeking the suspension of federal funding streams to Hopkins, for an audit of all federal funding received by the School of Medicine since fiscal year 2021, and that the university adopt and publicly implement, prior to the start of this coming academic year, a formal institutional policy ending DEI.

Hopkins has historically been one of the largest recipients of federal funding for research in the country.

A number of specific programs and divisions of the medical school were named in the complaint for promoting diversity efforts, including the gynecology, pathology and pediatric residency programs. The university’s vice provost for diversity and inclusion was also mentioned by name in the complaint.

In a press release announcing the filing, America First Legal wrote that DEI policies have “afflicted” admissions, scholarships, faculty hiring, curricula, residency programs and federal research grants.

The Johns Hopkins medical school has “evaded” the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action, the conservative group claimed, by focusing on pipeline programs that encourage underrepresented students to apply for admission.

“Johns Hopkins has constructed a facade of legality around a deeply illegal system,” Megan Redshaw, counsel for the group, said in a statement. “They have replaced explicit race-based admissions with upstream sorting, downstream subsidies and bureaucratic double-speak designed to preserve racial preferences.”

The group claims that Hopkins has targeted “underrepresented minority” groups through race-based outreach and pathway programs, which includes those who identify as American Indian or Alaskan Native; Black or African American; Hispanic, Latinx or of Spanish origin; or native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. That, in turn, helps shape the applicant pool to achieve “racially preferred results” without having to consider race as an explicit admissions factor, the complaint reads.

“By defining underrepresentation exclusively in racial and ethnic terms, the School of Medicine explicitly excludes white and Asian applicants,” the complaint states. “This is neither race-neutral nor constitutionally permissible.”

Candidates for the medical school should have evidence of five specific characteristics, according to the school’s website. One of those is diversity.

“This is not merely a violation of the law,” the complaint reads. “It is a collapse of professional ethics and a betrayal of the medical profession’s fundamental obligations.”

The group lambasted a number of university initiatives, including the Hopkins Diversity Leadership Council, which is a universitywide council to advise Daniels on diversity; the House Staff Diversity and Inclusion Council, which aims to create an inclusive environment for residents at the medical school; and the summer Hopkins CARES program, which works to “inspire and provide opportunities” to underrepresented students in science, public health or medicine.

The group also attacked financial aid programs at Hopkins, including one given by alum Michael Bloomberg, making the medical school free to attend for those from families making under $300,000 a year. About two-thirds of Hopkins medical students, according to the university, qualify for the scholarship.

But the conservative group argued that “it is well recognized that race and ethnicity are inseparable from socioeconomic status,” adding that “Johns Hopkins masks racial preferences behind income thresholds.”

This is one of the first times that Hopkins has been directly targeted by a conservative group with ties to the Trump administration since the president took office in January.

Hopkins is under investigation and is one of the ten schools that is set to be visited by the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, though that visit has not yet taken place. Just days after the task force visited Columbia University and Harvard University, the federal government announced massive cuts to federal spending at the universities.

The criticism of the university seems to be increasing.

“Johns Hopkins is not training the next generation of physicians,” America First Legal’s complaint reads. “It is indoctrinating them.”

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