Students at Job Corps centers across the country, including Tongue Point Center in Astoria, filed a class action lawsuit Thursday in an attempt to prevent the Trump administration from shutting down the 61-year-old program.

The lawsuit, filed in Washington, D.C. federal court, names the Department of Labor and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a former Oregon representative, as defendants.

The lawsuit comes just a few weeks after the Department of Labor attempted to abruptly pause operations at 99 Job Corps centers, including multiple in Oregon. Students were ordered to leave within days of the announcement, and centers were scheduled to fully close operations on June 30.

The Job Corps is a Department of Labor program serving students 16-24 years old, many of whom come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. It offers training in trade programs, like carpentry and welding. The vast majority of the more than 25,000 Job Corps students are people of color, McCoy said.

Oregon has six Job Corps centers including the Tongue Point Center in Astoria, which serves more than 350 students and offers the only maritime program in the Job Corps system.

Maddex Davis-Newman, a carpentry student who started at Tongue Point in June 2024, is one of the students suing the Labor Department. According to the complaint, the shutdown of Tongue Point Center would leave Davis-Newman unable to graduate and get the certification he needs to get a job in the trades.

Labor department officials argued in an April “Transparency Report” that the pause was necessary due to low graduation rates and safety concerns at many of the campuses. But Job Corps students and staff have argued the statistics supporting the closure are outdated and misleading, and that the Trump Administration intends to entirely shut down the program. The department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

On June 4, in response to an earlier lawsuit from contractors working at Job Corps sites, a federal judge in New York issued a temporary restraining order pausing the closure of any Job Corps center. The judge recently extended that order until June 25. The students are hoping either their suit or the case in New York can render the June 30 closures void.

The students are represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Public Citizen Litigation Group.

Scott McCoy, deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said shutting down a center is supposed to be “slow and methodical.” Federal law requires written notices and time for public comment, and notifications to Congress, he said.

“The Trump administration has rather quickly and precipitously just decided to close all the centers, leaving all of those students in limbo and in jeopardy,” McCoy said.

The students in the lawsuit are seeking an order preventing both the government from closing the centers and the termination of contractors at each site.

The other students named in the lawsuit are based in Georgia, Mississippi, North Dakota and South Carolina.

McCoy said if the closures are allowed to continue, many students will lose their source of housing, food and health care.

“We really have fear that they’re going to end up back in homelessness again if the programs close,” he said.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/19/seven-job-corps-students-sue-labor-department-closures-oregon/