THE CORRIDOR: Episode 6

Justice Denied

For decades, the residents of St. John the Baptist Parish breathed in toxic chemicals from a massive complex that makes neoprene - a synthetic rubber. But while residents suspected something was wrong, they were still shocked when the EPA told them they had the highest risk of cancer in the nation. Why were they just now being warned? And what was the government going to do about it? In this episode, we follow one community’s search for justice.

Guests

DEena tumeh

 Deena Tumeh is a Senior Attorney at Earthjustice, where she leads litigation and advocacy efforts to reduce toxic air pollution and protect public health. Before joining Earthjustice, Deena served as a federal judicial law clerk and represented clients in impact litigation. She earned a Juris Doctorate from Stanford Law School and a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University.

beverly wright

Dr. Beverly L. Wright is a trailblazing environmental justice scholar, activist, and civic leader whose work has transformed how communities confront pollution, climate change, and racial health disparities. As the founder and Executive Director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ)—the first environmental justice center in the United States—Dr. Wright has spent over three decades empowering historically marginalized communities through research, education, and advocacy.

Born and raised in Louisiana’s infamous “Cancer Alley,” Dr. Wright’s lived experience fueled her groundbreaking research into the disproportionate environmental burdens faced by Black and low-income communities. A prolific author and educator, Dr. Wright holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the State University of New York at Buffalo and has received numerous accolades, including the Heinz Award for the Environment, the EPA Environmental Justice Achievement Award, and the Robert Wood Johnson Community Health Leadership Award.

Credits

The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is the lead reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. Executive produced by Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.

Transcript

[00:00] INTRODUCTION

AMY: You’re listening to The Corridor, presented by Threshold. To learn more and support our work, go to threshold podcast dot org.

KAI MIDBOE: I'm not sure that plants have been locating along the Mississippi River corridor with a racial motivation, but that doesn't mean that there's not a disproportionate impact being felt by the minority community.

JAY: This is Kai Midboe, head of Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality, in a TV interview from 1993. 

KAI: Minorities in Louisiana tend to be disproportionately represented in the poorer sectors of our economy, and what's happening is these companies are locating where they can buy land cheaply next to the Mississippi River and so forth, so there tends to be a disproportionate impact and we want to take a good careful look at that.

JAY: Hearing a state official, and the head of DEQ at that, even acknowledge that some communities might face more harm from pollution than others? That was a major step forward for environmental justice in Louisiana. And Midboe wasn’t an environmentalist: he was an industry guy who had been an oil and gas lawyer before leading DEQ.

JAY: At the time, Midboe was in charge of a commission investigating  whether race was a factor in pollution in the corridor. And, if it was one, to come up with solutions. When he was asked whether he thought he’d find something, Midboe replied: 

KAI: I think there's a real basis for concern and now we're gonna look into it.

JAY: The DEQ looked into it alright…they took a long, long look. When I started reporting in 2023, they were still looking into it. 

JAY: The Federal government was taking its time, too. Here's what Dr. Clarice Gaylord, director of EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, said in 1993: 

CLARICE: 'The agency is working on targeted enforcement efforts…The best strategy is to go after the communities that have the worst pollution … As an example, there's a targeted enforcement effort in Cancer Alley in Louisiana because that area of the country has the worst air quality in the country.'

JAY: But a decade later the US Commission on Civil Rights checked in on the EPA’s progress on environmental justice and found it… underwhelming. Despite President Clinton’s environmental justice executive order and a lot of publicity, the agency had still never denied a permit or withheld federal funding because of environmental racism. In fact, they had largely failed to even investigate most of the complaints they’d received.

JAY: And so pollution is still a big problem for residents of the corridor. 

JAY: But Louisiana isn’t the only place with a pollution problem. Nearly half of Americans breathe in unhealthy levels of air pollution every day. And we know that toxic waste and industrial pollution aren’t distributed evenly. You’re much more likely to breathe harmful air if you’re Black. 

JAY: But what are you supposed to do with that knowledge? If you live next to a plant, how can you prove you’re being unfairly harmed by pollution? And if you do prove it, who’s going to fix it?

JAY: In our last episode, we looked at the protests that drew new attention to environmental justice, and put a national spotlight on the Corridor. But as years passed and the government spun its wheels, people affected by pollution here decided to try their luck somewhere else: in court.  

JAY: I’m JNA and in this episode of The Corridor, we’re going to follow one community’s search for any law that might help them stop pollution—and what they found.

[04:07] A SEGMENT

DEENA: Some of these communities really feel in the dark about what it is that they're breathing every day. 

JAY: This is Deena Tumeh, a senior attorney at the environmental law firm, Earthjustice. Lawyers like Deena often get involved when the government  hasn't fixed the problem. But fighting environmental racism in court isn’t straightforward, because the law has historically treated civil rights and the environment as completely separate issues. 

DEENA: Environmental laws on their own are not enough, because they don't account for the concentration of environmental harm in low income communities of color, and they don't guarantee that the law will be enforced evenly across across these communities. So these communities like the communities in St John need both environmental laws and civil rights laws to be enforced.

JAY: Deena’s been working with residents in St. John the Baptist Parish, where air pollution is particularly severe.

DEENA: Saint John the Baptist Parish residents have suffered from the country's highest cancer risk from toxic air pollution for much of the last decade because the EPA and state agencies have failed to protect them. 

JAY: More than two hundred plants produce toxic chemicals in the corridor but in this episode, we’re going to follow the story of just one: Denka Performance Elastomer in St John. Denka makes neoprene, that squishy waterproof material in  things like wetsuits, yoga mats, and disposable gloves. 

DUPONT’S LARRY LIVINGSTON: The first successful general-purpose synthetic rubber ever made.

JAY: That’s a spokesperson for Dupont, the company that built this plant in 1969. A key ingredient in neoprene is a colorless liquid called chloroprene. It’s made the same way a lot of chemicals are: with fossil fuels. Denka got the ingredients to make chloroprene from other plants in the corridor, like Shell, which is just down the road. And like a lot of chemicals made here, it’s really dangerous.

DEENA: So in 2010, EPA concluded that a chemical called chloroprene is likely to be carcinogenic to humans, and that inhalation of chloroprene increased, not only the risk of cancer, but also damage to several systems in the human body, like the nervous, cardiovascular, hematological immune systems.

JAY: At the time, Louisiana was the only place in the U.S .where neoprene was made. But this wasn’t always the case. Another plant in Kentucky shut down in 2008 under pressure from politicians and residents angry about pollution. After that, the people who lived by this plant in Louisiana were the only people in the country who breathe in chloroprene on a daily basis. And 90% of those people are Black. 

JAY: Among those closest to the neoprene plant were children. Fifth Ward Elementary School was less than half a mile away, and over 300 kids went there. Most of them younger than 10, and nearly all Black or Brown.

DEENA: Children are paying the highest price for this. Children are more vulnerable to cancer risk from chloroprene because chloroprene mutates your DNA and kids accumulate cancer risk more rapidly than adults do, because their bodies are less able to repair the genetic damage.  

JAY: Kids weren’t the only ones at risk. For decades, lots of people worried that pollution from the plant was making them sick. For one - the plant stinks. Chloroprene has a sweet pungent odor that’s kind of like nail polish remover. That smell kept people indoors year-round. Some said they couldn’t turn their air conditioners on even in the middle of a hot summer because it made the smell worse. But scientific proof, especially the kind that government officials would accept, was hard to come by.

DEENA:  And then in 2014, EPA concluded that Saint John residents faced the highest cancer risk from toxic air pollution in the nation…And EPA at the time attributed about 85% of that cancer risk from chloroprene emissions from just one facility in the parish. 

JAY: That one facility was Denka. And that EPA report confirmed what residents had always suspected. 

JAY: Now, if you’re a resident of St John, and the government agency that’s supposed to  protect the environment pointed out that something bad was happening in your community…  like an elevated risk of cancer from air pollution… you would  assume that somebody would have to fix it, right?

DEENA: These are rampant and deadly health risks that are preventable, but it requires political will to prevent them.

But that political will wasn’t there. Lots of people felt like the state wasn’t giving them clear information, and when they did hear from state officials, it was often to downplay the situation.

DEQ SECRETARY BROWN: ​​There's no smoking gun. Believe me, if we felt that there was an imminent threat, we would be taking the appropriate measures to deal with this threat.

JAY: That’s the head of the Department of Environmental Quality speaking at a community meeting in St. John in 2016. He assured residents that they were monitoring air quality closely, and working with Denka to lower emissions. 

JAY: When the EPA inspected the plant, though, they found all kinds of places where chloroprene could be leaking into the air. In 2017, Denka agreed to install expensive pollution control equipment, which did help—a little. But chloroprene levels in St. John remained much higher than EPA’s safe limit. In fact, the DEQ claimed that those EPA limits were simply suggestions. 

DEQ SECRETARY BROWN: That is not a standard, that is just a guidance

AUDIENCE MEMBER: A guidance

DEQ SECRETARY BROWN: That EPA first put out. And everybody has sort of attached themselves to that number. I want you to detach yourself from that number … So all the numbers that folks have been putting out there saying it is a standard, there is no standard. It’s just guidance.

JAY: The plant manager at Denka was even more blunt. He told CNN that “there is no relationship between chloroprene and cancer." Behind the scenes, Denka was lobbying the EPA to recalculate the chemical’s risk and raise acceptable emissions standards. Louisiana’s State Health Officer, Dr. Jimmy Guidry [GID-dree], told people near Denka they should be more concerned about their own lifestyles than what was happening at the plant - this is something that people here had been hearing from industry lobbyists and politicians for years. 

JIMMY GUIDRY: You have to live healthy as best you can. You have to minimize exposures as best you can.

JAY: Many residents at the meeting weren’t satisfied with these answers. 

RESIDENT: We live here, you know, it's not like at the end of the meeting we pack up and we go to this other place. We live here, our kids are here, you know, our families are here. So it's a serious concern.

JAY: But it didn’t feel like anyone else was taking it seriously. Government investigations, public pressure, and voluntary agreements had not fixed the problem. This is where Deena and the Earthjustice lawyers came in.

DEENA: Concerned citizens of Saint John, and some other groups in Louisiana, approached us…asking to see if we could help them with some serious environmental issues they were having in their communities.

JAY: Concerned Citizens of St John formed right after people learned about the cancer risk from chloroprene. They lobbied state and local politicians; held community meetings; collected air monitoring data; and filed petitions. They also protested.

DEATH ALLEY MARCH 2019: Dupont, Denka, you’re in violation!

JAY: They weren’t asking for the plant to close—they just wanted emissions to be below the safe limit. But they weren’t getting anywhere. 

JAY: The EPA had shown how toxic the air was near Denka. They documented major violations at the plant, and study after study showed the unfair burden of pollution on BIPOC communities. But as residents soon learned, while the government can use this data to levy fines or demand change, they don’t have to do any of those things. And in St John, they mostly didn’t.

DEENA: Enforcement has been a problem in the past. Part of the problem is that the rules are written away in a way that can make them difficult to enforce. And another major issue is that sometimes EPA doesn't have the will to fully enforce these rules. 

JAY: So people set out to make them do something—in court. But how?  

JAY: Well, you could sue them directly, claiming that Denka’s actions caused you personal harm. And that’s the first thing people in St. John tried. They sued Denka in their local court, asking a judge to make the plant keep emissions below the safe limit. But it’s hard to prove that one single plant caused a health problem when there are so many factors involved, and their cases went nowhere. 

JAY: And people living near the plant felt like there was another reason their concerns had been ignored for so long, a reason that had to do with alllll the history here in the River Parishes, and really, across the whole country. A lot of them thought the situation would be a whole lot different if they were white. 

JAY: Here’s Robert Taylor, the founder of Concerned Citizens of St John, in 2019.

ROBERT TAYLOR: They had the science, and they decided we were expendable.

JAY: State officials insisted that their decisions about industry had nothing to do with race, and that the risk of cancer from pollution didn’t either. But back in the 1990s, a federal commission had proven that race was a factor, and now EPA data was backing that up. But EPA isn’t just supposed to prevent pollution: it’s supposed to prevent discrimination, too. All federal agencies are. But making that happen is more difficult than it sounds. 

JAY: That’s because laws about discrimination and laws about pollution have two different origin stories. Making these two bodies of law work together is difficult, even when the government says it’s trying.  

JAY: For people in St John, it didn’t really feel like the government had ever been trying. But by 2021, a new administration was in office, one that seemed to take environmental justice very seriously. Here’s President Biden: 

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Environmental justice will be the mission of the entire government –- (applause)-- woven directly into how we work with state, local, Tribal, and territorial governments.

For example, there's a lot we still don't know about the quality of people's wastewater or the air they're breathing. There's still a lot we don't know about the cumulative impacts of pollution on people's health.

We need to learn more so we can serve those communities better and help the world overall.

JAY: And Biden’s new head of the EPA, Michael Regan, seemed committed to environmental justice, too. He even visited the Corridor. 

MICHAEL REGAN: When you visit a place like St. John the Baptist Parish, you don't just simply look away. Before I ended that visit, I vowed that EPA would take action in response to the alarming conditions we saw while here on the ground. I pledged to prioritize the health and safety of this community and other communities like this that have been historically overburdened by pollution. 

JAY: With new leaders saying all the right things, people in St John and lawyers like Deena felt like the time was right for a new strategy. They didn’t just want to prove that Denka was polluting: they wanted to show that the whole way Louisiana issues permits to industry was discriminatory. To do that, they were going to try a different legal approach, one that tied air pollution to civil rights and tied the history of industry to the history of racism in the River Parishes. 

JAY: After the break: the EPA comes to town. 

Break

[16:51] B SEG

MICHAEL REGAN: I'll never forget my first trip to St. John the Baptist Parish. I distinctly remember standing on the grounds of a school that was a stone's throw away from a facility that manufactures toxic chemicals. 

JAY: Welcome back to The Corridor, I’m Jaha Nailah Avery, and this is EPA administrator Michael Regan in 2023, speaking by the Fifth Ward elementary school in St. John the Baptist Parish.  

MICHAEL REGAN: The children who attend that school, who study at that school, who eat lunch at that school every single day look just like my son, Matthew. And nearly every person that I spoke with knew someone who suffered from an illness that they believed was connected to the pollution in the air they breathe. I was able to see firsthand the generational and widespread effects pollution can have on so many of our families. 

JAY: Regan was the first Black man to lead EPA. He had grown up in North Carolina, less than a 100 miles from Warren County where the protests over a landfill launched the nationwide movement for environmental justice in the 1980s. It’s something he talked about often, saying it inspired his career path. And in Louisiana, Regan’s vocal commitment to environmental justice gave residents of Cancer Alley hope that their concerns would finally be taken seriously. 

DEENA:  I think communities and advocates were really encouraged by what they were hearing EPA say it would do.

JAY: This is Deena Tumeh again, an attorney with Earth Justice. For the first time since the 1990s, with a new president and new leadership at EPA, it seemed like environmental justice might actually be a government priority. 

DEENA: EPA promised to enforce title six and a promise to advance environmental justice. And so, you know, after they sort of made that announcement, community started filing these complaints

JAY: Among those taking action were the Concerned Citizens of St John. 

JAY: The first thing they did was sue EPA under the Clean Air Act. They wanted to make the agency update air pollution standards for chloroprene. They also filed a petition, asking EPA to use its emergency powers to stop Denka from polluting, immediately. 

JAY: But these were stop-gap measures, aimed at one specific plant. They didn’t address what people felt was the bigger issue: discrimination in who was exposed to industrial pollution in the first place. For that, they needed to look at a whole different set of laws. Civil rights laws.   

JAY: But that’s also where things get more complicated. Because over the years, the Supreme Court has blocked off many of the legal pathways that people could use to address racial disparities.

JAY: The first place you might think to go for civil rights issues is the Constitution, specifically the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. That’s the one that says that states have to treat everyone equally under the law. 

ARCHIVAL: The 14th Amendment

JAY: The 14th amendment is the one that civil rights lawyers used to desegregate schools in the 1950s, and to overturn laws prohibiting interracial marriage in the 1960s. 

JAY: But although the 14th amendment was used to make these landmark decisions, in 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that the impact of a policy doesn’t matter if we don’t know the intention behind it. 

BYRON WHITE: We hold that to prove an unconstitutional racial discrimination under the equal protection or Due Process Clauses, it is essential that a racially discriminatory purpose be shown in some manner.

JAY: For it to count, you basically need somebody  to actually say, on the record, ‘I’m being racist.’ And in Louisiana, public officials, both white and black, were insisting that race was only a coincidence. 

DEENA: Intentional discrimination is very difficult to show.

JAY: So for people in St. John, the 14th amendment was out. But there was another option. 

DEENA: So the way anti-discrimination law in the United States works is that we've traditionally divided it up into two camps. There's intentional discrimination and disparate impact. 

JAY: Disparate impact is about outcomes. Because whether or not anybody intends for pollution to cause more harm to BIPOC people, it’s still a fact that it does. Especially in the Corridor, where the people affected by pollution are disproportionately Black.

DEENA: Because oftentimes these state actors aren’t acting with an intention to discriminate Just the impact of the decisions they're making would have a disparate impact on these populations. 

JAY: And to address that impact, lawyers turn to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the massive piece of legislation that outlawed discrimination in schools, businesses, public spaces, voting, and employment. A key part of that Act is Title 6, the law that EPA had promised to start using back in the 90s after President Clinton’s executive order on environmental justice. 

DEENA: Title six of the Civil Rights Act prohibits these state agencies and others from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. 

JAY: Title 6 says that state agencies can’t get federal funds if they discriminate, intentionally or not. 

DEENA: It's possible to violate title six of the Civil Rights Act without necessarily having the intent to discriminate. 

JAY: So evidence of unfair pollution in St. John would make a great Title 6 lawsuit, right? You’d think so—except that, in 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that individuals can’t sue for disparate impact. The only way to get it enforced is to file a complaint with a federal agency like EPA, asking them to review whether somebody they fund is discriminating against you. For a long time though, these kinds of complaints went nowhere. 

DEENA: EPA has a history of failing to implement title six. 

JAY: In its 50 plus year history, EPA has almost never made a formal finding of discrimination. Nine out of every ten complaints alleging environmental discrimination have been dismissed without investigation. 

DEENA: You know, Title VI is part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and EPA has been obligated since that time to enforce Title VI. But for decades, EPA didn't enforce it at all. 

JAY: Even in the Clinton era, when the EPA loudly stated its commitment to environmental justice, not one of the nearly 60 Title 6 claims filed went anywhere. 

JAY: But people kept filing complaints because it was one of the only legal pathways left for communities unfairly impacted by pollution. And so complaints just piled up. For decades. Until 2022. 

DEENA: In January 2022, concerned citizens of Saint John and Sierra Club filed a civil rights complaint with the EPA, and they alleged that the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and the Louisiana Department of Health violated their civil rights by failing to protect the predominantly black community in Saint John from disproportionate toxic air pollution.  

JAY: Their complaint said that these state agencies had engaged in racial discrimination by allowing so many polluting industries to operate in majority Black communities.  

JAY: And surprisingly—THIS complaint actually got somewhere. 

JAY: Just days after the complaint was filed, EPA administrator Michael Regan sent a letter to the CEO of Denka, warning that EPA and the Department of Justice were going to “redouble their efforts to seek timely and concrete relief for this community.” And that spring, EPA came to inspect Denka… again. 

DEENA: So in 2022, the EPA inspected the neoprene production facility in Saint John and discovered that the facility was illegally dumping hazardous waste in an open brine pit. They measured alarming amounts of chloroprene in the air, and it was so unsafe to breathe there, actually, that EPA inspectors had to leave the premises and couldn't finish the inspection that day.

JAY: The EPA also sent a new “pollution accountability team” to collect data across Cancer Alley, equipped with all kind of gear—hand-held ultraviolet gas detectors, infrared cameras, a van with a built-in weather station. Sort of like ghostbusters, but for invisible air toxins. They even had a special airplane. 

JAY: After all this investigating, EPA found what people in St. John already knew. The people living closest to the plant were exposed to chloroprene levels much higher than the safe limit, and this exposure increased their lifetime risk of cancer. The risk was even worse for kids. According to air monitoring data, babies born near the plant would pick up more than a lifetime’s worth of cancer risk in just their first two years. 

JAY: EPA didn’t just find pollution violations. They also found problems with the way DEQ and the Department of Health operated. They found that the state hadn’t provided accurate information to those most affected; that the state had no process for even considering environmental justice; and that there didn’t seem to be a way for citizens to ask questions or make complaints, something the EPA requires of agencies that get their money—and frankly, what every government is supposed to do. Not only that, even the air permits that Louisiana had given to Denka were expired—and had been for years.

JAY: All of this appeared to vindicate the Title 6 complaint that Deena helped residents to file. So what was the EPA going to do about it? 

DEENA: EPA is required by law to try to resolve these complaints by reaching an informal resolution agreement with the parties that allegedly, you know, violated Title VI. They're called informal resolution agreements, and these agreements can require them to take measures to ensure compliance with Title VI. 

JAY: Compliance, meaning: stop discriminating. The EPA was taking Title 6 more seriously than it ever had. It was pro-actively making environmental justice a criteria for getting federal money. The  EPA also took action on the complaints residents had raised earlier: first, it forced Denka to change how it disposed of hazardous waste. Then, it sued the plant directly asking a court to make it lower its emissions. Immediately.

JAY: Even Louisiana started to do something. The state conducted its first public health study on chloroprene, taking urine samples from residents and confirming that the chemical posed an increased risk of cancer. 

JAY: By the time EPA leader Michael Regan returned to St John to give a speech in the spring of 2023, it seemed like the environmental and civil rights lawsuits were converging to force real action in Louisiana and in the EPA.  And on that visit, Regan announced a sweeping new policy. 

REGAN: Folks, our work isn’t done. And that’s why I'm proud to announce today that EPA is building on our commitment and proposing a regulation that would reduce more than 6 000 tons of highly toxic chemicals each and every year slashing the emissions of Highly toxic chemicals like chloroprene and ethylene oxide also known as ETO.

APPLAUSE

When finalized, this regulation will drastically reduce the risk of cancer especially in states like Louisiana and Texas where the vast majority of these facilities are located. 

JAY: A new set of rules to limit emissions from chemical and plastics plants; just what residents in St. John had asked for in 2021. Meanwhile, an agreement between EPA and the state to resolve the Title 6 complaint was inching  towards approval. And because residents of another parish, St. James, had also filed a Title 6 complaint, the draft agreement would resolve that one too. In fact, it  would overhaul the entire way Louisiana issues air quality permits. 

DEENA: It would have required the agency to consider the disparate impact of air permitting decisions, on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

JAY: Not only would the state have to consider the disproportionate impact of individual permits, but for the first time it would have to consider how much pollution a community is already exposed to and how a new plant would add to that risk. 

DEENA: In a state like Louisiana, with a rampant and deadly history of environmental injustice, this kind of change could have made an enormous difference for the communities who really need it most. It could have potentially saved lives. 

JAY: For people in the corridor, the Title 6 agreement would be a game-changer. But at the last minute, Louisiana made a surprise move. 

DEENA: the Louisiana attorney general sued EPA and challenged EPA's action not only in these complaints and in this investigation, but also its title six regulations writ large. 

JAY: Louisiana wasn’t just challenging this one Title 6 complaint in St John. They were challenging the whole premise of ‘disparate impact.’

DEENA: The attorney general argued that EPA's regulations prohibiting disparate impact under Title Six were unlawful. 

JAY: Louisiana was going after one of the last remaining parts of civil rights law for achieving environmental justice. And they were doing it using a timeworn tactic: accusing the people pointing out racial inequality of being racist themselves. They were essentially saying, “I’m not racist, you are.” According to the lawsuit, by considering the disparate impact of pollution on Black people in St. John, EPA was actually discriminating against everyone else. The attorney general said that EPA officials were “moonlight[ing] as social justice warriors fixated on race.”

ARCHIVAL NEWS BITE

JAY: It was an aggressive argument, and one that went against precedent. Federal courts and the Supreme Court had ruled that disparate impact was something agencies like EPA could use. So it seemed like EPA was on solid footing for a legal showdown. But then… 

LPB REPORTER: EPA closes investigation into air quality and racial discrimination, leaving environmental advocates in disarray.

DEENA: So, unfortunately, in response to the lawsuit, EPA caved and it closed the Saint John Title Six complaints, and provided no relief to the community under the Title Six process. 

JAY: After all that momentum, the EPA suddenly just...gave up. The decision surprised Deena, who thought they were on their way to a groundbreaking agreement. 

JAY: Was that something ya’ll were expecting?

DEENA: No, we weren't expecting it. Negotiations were going well. We were anticipating the parties to sign the informal resolution agreement. 

BEVERLY WRIGHT: The majority of us wanted it to go to court.

JAY: Here’s Dr. Beverly Wright, from the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. 

BEVERLY WRIGHT: As hard as EPA worked to get the deal with the state, and our democratic governor had agreed to all of it…the EPA had to follow what came down from the Department of Justice…The Department of Justice wimped out and decided not to pursue it.

JAY: I reached out to Regan and the EPA for comment but they declined to speak with me. So if legal precedent was on their side, what was the Department of Justice afraid of? Well, a lot has changed at the Supreme Court. 

DEENA: Of course looming over this whole case is the fact that our Supreme Court is entertaining arguments that previous Supreme Courts have not entertained, and they're overturning precedent.

JAY: If Louisiana’s lawsuit had gotten all the way to the Supreme Court, as many predicted that it would, this whole part of civil rights law could be gutted not just in Louisiana, but across the country. This would mean that any attempt to address systemic disparities rather than individual cases of racism would be nearly impossible. And maybe for the Biden administration, the risk that Louisiana might win was just too big of a risk to take. But others, like Beverly, disagree. 

BEVERLY WRIGHT: They were afraid that they might win and it would destroy their chances elsewhere. Well, it was destroyed anyway.

JAY: That’s because dropping the investigation didn’t stop Louisiana from going after Title 6. 

DEENA: EPA's decision to abandon this community has raised serious concerns about its commitment to enforcing civil rights violations. 

DEENA: The court ended up agreeing with Louisiana and issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting EPA and the Department of Justice from enforcing their disparate impact regulations under title six against Louisiana agencies. 

JAY: In 2024, a bunch more states attorneys general, all Republicans, petitioned EPA to completely eliminate disparate impact from its regulations. When I talked to Deena back then, it felt like the country was on the verge of a huge rollback. 

DEENA: For 60 years Title six has been a critical tool in stopping discrimination nationwide, not only in the environmental context, but also in transportation and education in all sorts of areas. We know that disproportionate harm is still happening…So these attorneys general are what they're proposing now is to go back on on social equity. I think some of these states are doing whatever they can to make sure that they don't have to comply with federal civil rights law. 

JAY: And sure enough, one of the first actions of the current Trump administration was to do exactly what Louisiana and these other states wanted: to revoke every disparate impact regulation it could find, all the way back to the 1960s.

JAY: But let’s go back to 2023, when the Biden EPA dropped the Title 6 investigation in the corridor. 

DEENA: The closure triggered a ripple effect across the country. EPA has watered down agreements with other states. This decision ultimately leaves some of the most vulnerable communities even more vulnerable.

JAY: So civil rights, for now, was out the window. But weren’t there a few other lawsuits, using other laws, that could still work? What about the new rules for emissions at chemical plants that Regan announced on his visit?

NEWS CLIP: Denka granted two year extension; other options? 

JAY: And Louisiana’s attorney general, the one who had sued to overturn the whole concept of disparate impact? His name is Jeff Landry and he’s now the governor. Here he is at a press conference at Denka. 

JEFF LANDRY: Neoprene is important, blah blah blah

JAY: As Governor, Landry even signed a law making it illegal for community groups to use and share data from their own air monitoring tools - tools like the bucket used by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. 

JAY: Even the new rules about chemical emissions that Regan announced got hung up in court, and are now in the process of being rolled back by the Trump administration. 

MUSIC

JAY: So with all these legal pathways hitting a seeming dead end, where does that leave the people in the corridor? 

JAY: Not long after the Title 6 complaint was dismissed, I asked Shamyra Lavigne of Rise St. James what keeps her going in the face of adversity.

SHAMYRA: Faith is what sustains us. That stone that David used to take our Goliath was faith. It wasn't that. It was a special stone. It was about what? What was going into that stone being thrown. David already saw the defeat of the lion. And we have to keep our eye on the defeat of Goliath. It is critical to remain focused on what you visualize for your community, and remember why you're doing it. 

JAY: And for people worried about chloroprene pollution in St. John, at the end of a long, disheartening legal road, a few surprises were still in store. 

NEWS CLIP: “Thursday night in a 7 to 4 vote the St John School Board voted to close the Fifth Ward elementary for the 2025 - 2026 school year”

JAY: That school near Denka closed. The school board cited declining enrollment and budget concerns as the reason, not pollution. But the students closest to the plant - the ones most at risk - got relocated regardless. 

JAY: And then in the spring of 2025, an even bigger surprise. 

WGNO ANCHOR: fter years of environmental complaints from the neighbors, the Denka chemical plant in St. John Parish is suspending operations.

JAY: That’s right. The plant at the center of all the lawsuits and the Title 6 complaint closed. Not because of any legal action, and not because its parent company decided to stop polluting. Denka said the reason was financial—decrease in global demand, declining profits, and what they claimed were the extraordinary costs required to meet environmental regulations. I reached out to Denka for this story and never got a response. 

JAY: For now, big questions remain unresolved. Chloroprene isn’t the only toxic chemical here. And many politicians and industry leaders still chalk up death and illness near these plants to individual lifestyle choices. The way the law stands now, the whole definition of racism is individual, too. It’s only discrimination if somebody says it out loud. Maybe that’s because it’s just too overwhelming to think of these things as systemic, as collective choices. Or maybe… it’s because it lets a whole lot of people off the hook. 

JAY: Here’s Shamyra Lavigne again.

SHAMYRA: We're trying to change something that has been flawed for decades, and we're trying to change the people who are benefiting from this financially, who are willing to turn a blind eye…We still have to stay on the EPA to…make sure there's consequences whenever the industries break the law, because they will break the law. They've been breaking the law historically since they've been here. They cannot be trusted, are not good neighbors…as bad as we want it to change, it takes time. It takes a lot of time, and it's a marathon…it's an emotional ride. 

JAY: Next time…in the face of setback after setback, what’s next? 

LENORA: People just don't realize how contaminated they are. You know, I think it's all that Nimby mentality. I don't really see that plant right here, so it couldn't be harming me. Okay. But it is.  

Credits

AMY: The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is our reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. I’m executive producer Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.

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