A judge says firing Black officials was about politics, not race. Trump fired six of eight.

Alvin Brown was the only Black member of the National Transportation Safety Board when President Trump fired him in May 2025. His replacement, John DeLeeuw, is white. On Nov. 2, a federal judge threw out Brown’s claim that the firing was racially motivated.

Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, ruled that Brown had “failed to plausibly allege that his removal was motivated by race.” She wrote that “firing people because of their policy views is not tantamount to firing them because of their race,” and said statistical gaps alone do not establish discrimination when the comparison ignores politics, qualifications or which president made the appointment.

The numbers Brown brought are hard to wave off. As Capital B reported, the suit he filed alongside Robert Primus, the former Surface Transportation Board chairman, counts 13 multimember agency boards that were 74% white and 16% Black before the removals. Six of the eight Black commissioners were dismissed, according to the filing, against 10 of 37 white commissioners. Those boards are now 90% white and 7% Black.

That is 75% of Black commissioners removed, against 27% of white ones.

The administration says race had nothing to do with it. “The only factor guiding the Trump administration’s personnel decisions is competence,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said when the suits were filed.

Friedrich’s reasoning has a real argument behind it: Trump has removed Democrats from independent agencies across the board, and the Supreme Court has been widening presidents’ power to do it. But Brown’s lawyers pointed out that two other Democrats stayed on the NTSB. If the test is party, the Democrats who were kept are not the ones who were Black.

The ruling also left the larger question untouched. Bloomberg Law reported that the judge sidestepped the administration’s claim that courts cannot review presidential firings at all. A dismissal at the pleading stage says Brown had not yet shown motive. It does not say the pattern is a coincidence.

Primus filed a separate suit in October 2025 and later added the same race claim. Both men are represented by Democracy Forward. Congress confirmed these officials, and it should ask the administration why the firing list looks the way it does.