How a former HUD civil rights lawyer courageously challenged Trump

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The early days of the second Trump administration were so chaotic that it was impossible to keep track of all the unceremonious firings, disrespect for public service, and disregard for settled law (though god knows I tried.) Paul Osadebe, formerly a civil rights lawyer at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), witnessed the blatant disregard up close—and chose to share with the world what he saw.

In a new book out Tuesday called “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear,” authors Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer endeavor to show how courage in this political moment—both domestically and globally—can take many forms. The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and the senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, respectively, interviewed more than 100 dissidents and activists about the ways they’ve tried to protect their communities from the forces of autocracy that threaten to upend them. Some they spoke with purposely set out to make change, while others (like Osadebe) were put in extraordinary circumstances during the course of normal life that required a level of bravery they didn’t know they had.

Just as I did with USAID whistleblower Nicholas Enrich’s explosive book back in April, The Handbasket is excited to share another exclusive excerpt. This one comes from a chapter of “On Courage” called “A Moral Collision: A Small Feeling and a Big Choice,” that details Osadebe’s observation in February 2025 that the Fair Housing Act—the landmark Civil Rights-era law making it illegal to deny Americans housing based on race—was not being enforced by Trump’s HUD cronies. So he decided to blow the whistle, ultimately being terminated last October. “No one is watching, he told a ProPublica journalist at the time. “No one will hold them accountable.”

While the wheels of accountability move slowly, we’re finally starting to see them turn. Osadebe and other former colleagues are now suing the Trump administration for the dismantling of their office, and they continue to campaign and lobby Congress to enforce the protections against housing discrimination enshrined in the law.

Though Osadebe has trouble personally using the word courage to describe his actions, as the book describes, we can certainly say it for him. Read on for his story and purchase the book here.

On a crisp, bright day in February 2025, a mild-mannered civil rights lawyer named Paul Osadebe came to the terrible realization that a cornerstone of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy was not likely to survive.

The Fair Housing Act had passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1968, just seven days after an assassin’s bullet ended King’s life. The law barred landlords from advertising or renting to “Whites only” and made housing discrimination illegal for the first time in U.S. history.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson had already signed the Civil Rights Act into law, guaranteeing equal treatment for Black Americans seeking a job, a meal, or a hotel room. Housing was the next frontier, a bid to redeem the “promissory note” of equal rights that King had invoked. Its passage, Johnson declared at the signing ceremony, finally meant that no one in America in search of shelter would “suffer the humiliation of being turned away because of their race.”

But Osadebe believed all that was at risk. He had worked since 2021 in the federal office tasked with enforcing fair housing rules. It was his job to help fulfill Johnson’s promise by prosecuting violations of the landmark law. If a landlord told an immigrant family that no units were open so that they could lease to an English-speaking couple instead, or if they denied a disabled tenant’s request for a service animal, Osadebe’s office could step in to sue the landlord.

But since January 2025, when new management moved into the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Osadebe had noticed that his new bosses seemed uninterested in en-forcing civil rights law. It was an indifference that verged on hostility.

The trouble began with a “gag order” blocking him and his colleagues from communicating with anyone outside the agency about civil rights complaints. A few weeks later, HUD officials abandoned a case against a predominantly White homeowners association north of Dallas that had tried to push low-income Black residents out of their neighborhood. Then, on February 14, the new administration carried out a mass firing across the government—a “Valentine’s Day Massacre,” the media called it. Twenty percent of the fair housing office was terminated in a single day.

After the firings, Osadebe realized that enforcement of the Fair Housing Act was in peril. The law would still exist on paper, but not in practice.

They’re not going to let us do our jobs, he thought.

But the crisis was not understood beyond the walls of the HUD offices, much less breaking through to the outside world. Poor tenants across the country didn’t yet know that their housing rights had shrunk considerably. Even members of Congress, tasked by the U.S. Constitution with oversight of the executive branch, appeared to be unaware that the new administration was bulldozing these basic protections. There was information, however, that could alert all of them to the emergency unfolding beneath their feet, and Osadebe could be the one to deliver it.

Still, he recoiled at the thought of sticking his neck out. Though he was a union steward at the federal agency, he didn’t consider himself an activist type, preferring to spend his free hours playing video games and going to concerts. His parents—working-class Nigerian immigrants—had always counseled their son to work hard, go to church, and keep his head down. When he told his younger sister about what was going on at the office, she urged him to stay quiet: “We are not people with a safety net to fall back on,” she warned.

His family’s voices battled his own conscience. Blowing the whistle would almost certainly mean facing retaliation. The end of his employment. The end of a stable income. Given the political climate, he wondered if it might even trigger a more acute threat—people finding his parents’ address, tracking them down, and harassing them.

But Osadebe was a civil rights attorney. He had committed his career to protecting vulnerable people against discrimination and exploitation. “I was able to go to a law school that used to be segregated. I am living in an apartment that would have been segregated in the past. I have been able to live the life that I’ve had because the civil rights movement made real gains,” he says. “I just don’t want to live in a country that doesn’t have civil rights.”

He cleared out his office so that there wouldn’t be much to carry if he was eventually frog-marched out of the building. And then he began to talk. He spoke to a local television sta-tion one day after the mass firing. The next day he gave his first live television interview to MSNBC.

Wearing an olive green sweater and holding his head still, the attorney told a national TV audience what he had seen at work. “We’re losing the ability to protect people in their day-to-day lives,” he warned. “Unless people take action and respond, we’re going to be seeing a lot of pain.”

Excerpted from the book ON COURAGE, provided courtesy of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2026. Reprinted by permission.