The U.S. Justice Department has withdrawn from an agreement with the city of Houston to curb illegal dumping in Black and Latino neighborhoods, part of the Trump administration’s broad dismantling of environmental justice initiatives across the federal government.

Federal authorities quietly ended the monitoring this year as they pulled the plug on a similar settlement over wastewater problems in rural Alabama, according to three former law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the move wasn't made public.

Without federal monitoring, advocates in Houston said city officials have become less responsive to residents afflicted by persistent dumping in the historically Black neighborhood of Trinity/Houston Gardens.

“We have nothing to fight with anymore," resident Huey German-Wilson, who has spent years drawing attention to the problem, told The Associated Press this week during a tour of illegal dumping hotspots. "We’ve got a watered-down EPA. We’ve got no assistance from the DOJ. The city has no reason to respond to us, and we’re finding that they are truly ignoring us.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

A DOJ investigation found in 2023 that the Houston neighborhood in question had been inundated by illegal dumping of trash, medical waste, mattresses and even dead bodies and “rotting carcasses” — a description local officials insisted was exaggerated.

Its settlement with the city called for a three-year period of federal monitoring, public data reporting requirements and community outreach to impacted neighborhoods.

Houston officials did not respond to requests for comment. Former mayor Sylvester Turner, a Democrat, had called the DOJ investigation “absurd, baseless and without merit,” though his administration later agreed to the federal monitoring. The city previously has pointed to its efforts to combat illegal dumping through One Clean Houston, a multimillion-dollar cleanup and enforcement initiative.

Houston had been in compliance with the DOJ settlement at the time it ended and was “taking accountability,” one of the former law enforcement officials said, in part by improving communication among city departments.

The nixing of the settlement, which had been set to expire next June, came as the Trump administration directed federal agencies to eliminate jobs and programs dedicated to environmental justice. It followed Trump’s sweeping executive order putting a stop to diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the U.S. government.

The Justice Department announced in April it was ending an agreement with Alabama over persistent wastewater issues in Lowndes County, a high-poverty area between Selma and Montgomery, where a type of soil makes it difficult for traditional septic tanks to work. A federal investigation found the majority-Black community has long been exposed to raw sewage and lacked basic sanitation services as officials engaged in a pattern of inaction and neglect.

The Alabama agreement required the state develop a public health and infrastructure improvement plan and stop prosecuting residents who lack the resources to install or repair wastewater systems. It was the result of the Justice Department’s first environmental justice investigation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits recipients of federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin in their federally funded programs and activities.

Such inquiries have been abandoned by the Trump administration.

In Houston, illegal dumping has been a hot-button issue for years. It drew DOJ's attention after Lone Star Legal Aid filed a complaint about city response times lagging considerably for pickups in Black and Latino neighborhoods compared to white communities.

During the first year of federal monitoring, the city picked up illegal dumping much faster, rolled out new vehicles and added additional manpower, said German-Wilson, president of the Trinity/Houston Gardens Super Neighborhood, a community group. “We could email everybody,” she said, “and they were listening very intently to see what they could do differently.”

But the city this year has received thousands of complaints about illegal dumping, which was on full display last week when an AP reporter walked past heaping piles of trash and debris, including mattresses, construction waste, a toilet, mulch, wooden pieces of a fence and a car bumper. Some of the piles began as long uncollected leaves and tree branches.

“We also find animals dumped in the midst of all of this," German-Wilson said. "It's never ending."

AP Video by Lekan Oyekanmi