The Justice Department announced Thursday that it is moving to close more than 50 long-running school desegregation cases, some of which have remained under federal court oversight for more than half a century.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, said the department is ending federal supervision of districts where the original problems addressed by the court orders have been resolved. The cases include school districts in Connecticut, Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi and other states.

"In this administration, we are ending prolonged federal oversight of these school districts because the effort does not reflect the reality of those classrooms today," Dhillon said. She also described the consent decrees as outdated and said districts should be able to redirect resources toward students rather than continuing to comply with decades-old court orders.

The cases stem from the federal government's effort to dismantle legally enforced racial segregation in public schools following the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Many of the lawsuits were filed during the 1960s and 1970s and resulted in consent decrees requiring school districts to change student assignment policies and other practices.

A district can eventually be declared to have achieved "unitary status," meaning it has eliminated the vestiges of the segregation addressed by the court order. Once the DOJ determines that a district has reached that point, it can ask the federal court overseeing the case to dismiss the decree. A federal judge must approve each dismissal.

The department has already closed several such cases under the Trump administration. In February, the DOJ ended a desegregation case involving Dyersburg City Schools in Tennessee that had been open for roughly 60 years. Other cases in Florida and Mississippi were also closed after courts determined the districts had reached unitary status.

The DOJ said Thursday that it will continue reviewing the remaining cases individually rather than automatically ending federal oversight across the board. The department said it will seek dismissal when its review determines that a district has achieved unitary status.

The move has drawn criticism from former Biden administration Civil Rights Division chief Kristen Clarke, who now serves as general counsel for the NAACP. Clarke argued that the consent decrees continue to provide protections against discrimination and warned that ending them could contribute to renewed racial disparities in public schools.

The Trump administration has significantly changed the priorities of the Civil Rights Division under Dhillon, including placing greater emphasis on issues such as alleged anti-Christian discrimination, university diversity programs, transgender sports policies and election-related enforcement. More than 75% of the division's staff have resigned or retired early since Dhillon took over, according to CBS News.

The latest move does not eliminate federal laws prohibiting racial discrimination in education. Instead, it seeks to end court supervision in individual districts that the Justice Department says have fulfilled the requirements imposed by decades-old desegregation orders.