into the frustration minorities have voiced about their treatment at DEA since the filing of a 1977 civil rights lawsuit that remains unresolved despite a series of court orders governing the agency’s hiring and promotion practices.
Last year, a federal judge ruled that DEA had run afoul of court orders intended to remove subjectivity from agent promotions.Like other federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, the DEA has struggled to fill its ranks with minorities.
Of the agency’s 4,400 special agents, just 8% are Black and 10% are Hispanic. The DEA said it could not immediately provide a racial breakdown of recent graduates of the Quantico, Virginia, academy, which puts through multiple classes a year of about 50 to 60 trainees.