ORIGIN OF THE SEARCH TERMS

The termination letters went out in March 2026. Forty-nine of the fifty grants in USDA’s Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program were canceled. The letters cited discriminatory preferences tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion. They cited waste, fraud, and abuse.

That is what the letters said. What the agency actually did to decide which forty-nine grants to cut is not, as of July 28, 2026, a fact any court has found. It is the open question at the center of a federal lawsuit, and the record of that question, read carefully, is more unsettling than a tidy finding would be.

The program itself was not obscure. Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access, or ILCMA, was announced by USDA’s Farm Service Agency in 2023: fifty projects selected, an intended investment of approximately $300 million, aimed at beginning and historically underserved producers, meaning Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, immigrant, veteran, and women farmers seeking help buying land, securing financing, and reaching markets they had been structurally locked out of.

What the June 2026 order decided

On June 30, 2026, Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction in Urban Sustainability Directors Network v. United States Department of Agriculture. Her finding: the terminations were “likely contrary to statute,” the plaintiffs would suffer irreparable harm without relief, and the balance of equities and the public interest favored restoring the funding while the case is litigated. USDA was ordered to reinstate the awards and file a status report by 5:00 p.m. on July 3.

Twenty-four organizations were covered by that order. Not forty-nine. Twenty-four is the number of grantees who had joined the lawsuit by the time it was decided. Among them: the Kansas Black Farmers Association, the Black Oregon Land Trust, Heru Urban Farming, the Center for Heirs’ Property, Four Bands Community Fund, and NDN Collective, alongside grantees like Iowa Valley RC&D and Cultivate Kansas City. Plaintiffs’ counsel at Earthjustice put the amount restored to them at $127 million, a figure press coverage has corroborated; the opinion itself states no aggregate dollar total.

What the June 2026 order did not decide

The June 2026 opinion does not say how USDA chose which of these twenty-four grants to cancel. It does not use the word “keyword.” Not once. Footnote 6 explains why: the arbitrary-and-capricious analysis, the part of a preliminary-injunction ruling where a court weighs the agency’s actual decision-making process, “need not be considered,” because the plaintiffs had already won on a narrower statutory argument: “the same argument,” the footnote notes, “that has previously succeeded for AC’s ILCMAP grant.” Judge Howell had a faster path to ruling for these plaintiffs, and she took it. For this round, the mechanism question was not reached.

It had been reached before, for a different, smaller set of grants: five of them, not six. In an August 2025 opinion, ruling on six grants terminated in an earlier round, Judge Howell found five of the terminations likely arbitrary and capricious, concluding flatly that “plaintiffs have demonstrated that the terminations of their individual grants were likely arbitrary and capricious.” That is a ruling on the mechanism itself, not a deferral of it. The sixth grant in that round was AC’s second grant, the one Land Access/ILCMAP-type award among them, and the opinion explicitly declined to reach the mechanism question for it, because that termination had not yet officially occurred; it won relief instead on a narrower statutory ground. The mechanism question, in other words, has never been affirmatively answered for a Land Access grant, not in the five-grant ruling and not in this one. Nor was the earlier ruling about the forty-nine grants terminated in March 2026; those are a separate, later batch, mostly under programs the five non-Land-Access August 2025 grants did not belong to. The sharper, more accurate story: the same court found the mechanism likely unlawful for five non-Land-Access grants, in an earlier round, and pointedly did not reach it for the one Land Access grant decided that same day. Ruling again in June 2026, given a faster statutory path, the court has not yet had to reach that same question for the forty-nine.

The June 12, 2026 schedule ordered USDA to produce, among other categories, “the origin of the search terms defendants employed to terminate the grants at issue,” due July 10. That order reaches further than the forty-nine grants named at the top of this piece: it covers every termination USDA characterized as DEI- or climate-related. USDA missed that deadline. On July 14, Judge Howell granted USDA a fourth extension, nunc pro tunc, over plaintiffs’ objection, resetting production to July 17 and writing that the agency “appear[s] to have made only minimal progress with production” and noting a privilege log plaintiffs called so vague some entries read simply “image001.png.” That is a document request still unmet, not a finding. The origin of the search terms is not yet a fact in this record. It is a fact this record is still trying to get USDA to produce.

Where the “keyword search” language actually comes from

It comes from a different opinion, in the same case, about different grants.

In August 2025, Judge Howell issued a first injunction, restoring six grants to the suit’s original plaintiffs. Only one of those six, AC’s second grant, was a Land Access Program grant of the kind ILCMA administers. The other five belonged to entirely different USDA programs: an urban forestry grant, a climate-smart-commodities grant, a community food projects grant, a beginning-farmer grant, a regional food-systems grant.

Two separate findings sit inside that opinion, covering three grants total, in programs unrelated to the forty-nine terminated in March 2026. Writing about USDN’s urban-forestry grant, titled to accelerate “equity centered climate action and sustainable community development,” Judge Howell questioned whether the agency had done “anything more than locate USDN via a keyword search for terms like ‘climate’ and ‘sustainable’—which are both in the grant project’s title.” At the same hearing, USDA’s own counsel conceded the point: asked whether “go[ing] in and see[ing] the words ‘climate change’ and press[ing] a delete button” would be an acceptable way to terminate a grant, defendants’ lawyer agreed it would not be, and “wouldn’t be in accordance with best practices.” Writing separately about PFC’s and IATP’s grants, both terminated over vague anti-DEI language, she found the letters’ wording “strongly suggest that defendants identified grants for the chopping block via a blunt keyword search, without much, if any, further inquiry.” One grant, one word test, one rationale, and an opposing lawyer’s own concession. Two more grants, the same inference, a different rationale. Her language in both findings is a hedge: strongly suggest, not find.

Tribal Business News, one of this essay’s own sources, described the posture correctly the first time: plaintiffs “argued USDA… unlawfully terminated awards by searching grant documents.” Argued. Not found. That distinction is the story.

Two rounds

The August 2025 order restored six grants. The opinion itemizes each award but states no combined total; summed here, they come to approximately $36.66 million: $28 million to USDN, $4.9 million to OBC, about $400,000 to AC’s first grant, $2.5 million to AC’s second grant, about $750,000 to PFC, and $111,694 to IATP. Five of those six grant terminations had already occurred, and the order preliminarily vacated them. The sixth, AC’s second grant, had not finished being terminated when the order came down; the court instead enjoined USDA from carrying that termination out at all. AC’s second grant, the $2.5 million one, was the only one of the six that was a Land Access Program award. The other five sat under five different USDA programs entirely.

The June 2026 order restored twenty-four grants. Plaintiffs’ counsel at Earthjustice put the total at $127 million, a figure press coverage has corroborated; the opinion itself states no aggregate dollar figure.

Six grants and twenty-four grants. $36.66 million and a reported $127 million. Those are the two injunctions in this fight, August 2025 and June 2026, in the same case. A third ruling, on May 29, 2026, ordered USDA to supplement the administrative record and answer discovery, a procedural win rather than a new round of restored money, and part of the same fight. The same court has now ordered the same agency, across three rulings, to put money back, or to stop it from being taken, using a process the agency has not yet had to fully explain.

The people the money was supposed to reach

USDA told the court it complied. Farm Service Agency staff were to contact recipients within the week. Diana Garcia-Padilla, founder of H.O.P.E. for Small Farm Sustainability in South Texas, had her grant terminated in March 2026, along with the other 48. She received her reinstatement letter on July 2, 2026. She told NPR, quoted here in full: “They tell me I’m tight with money, right? But we’re very good with money because we know it’s government money because we know it’s important that we do a good job so that we can continue to be funded.” Brien Darby, executive director of Cultivate Kansas City, put the ruling in narrower terms than victory: “It’s exciting, but it’s righting a wrong, it’s not really a step forward. And it’s temporary.”

What this is and is not a continuation of

Pigford v. Glickman, decided in 1999, settled claims in a federal consent decree: Black farmers had documented for decades that USDA systematically denied them loans and assistance that white farmers received, from at least 1981 to 1996. Just over $1 billion, $1.06 billion, was disbursed under that settlement. Farmers whose claims had been filed too late for the first round got a separate settlement in 2010, Pigford II, worth $1.25 billion: $100 million already available in the 2008 farm bill, plus $1.15 billion Congress appropriated new.

ILCMA is not a continuation of that case. No filing in the 2026 litigation cites Pigford. The African American Alliance of CDFI CEOs has placed ILCMA’s termination in Pigford’s lineage, recounting the settlement in one paragraph and ILCMA’s termination in the next. That is a live claim in the field. The statute and the docket don’t show it. The actual chain of custody, stated precisely, runs through a different provision than the one usually named for it.

In 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act’s Section 1005 tried to pay down the debt of “socially disadvantaged” farmers directly, a race-conscious remedy. Three federal courts enjoined it, including in Miller v. Vilsack, on the grounds that a debt-relief program sorted by race was likely unconstitutional. No payments were ever made under Section 1005.

ILCMA does not descend from Section 1005. Per the court’s own opinion in this case, the Land Access Program “originated with section 1006 of the American Rescue Plan Act,” a separate provision in the same 2021 law, funding equity commissions, land-access grants, and agricultural-credit training rather than direct debt relief. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act amended that section: IRA Section 22007, section 1006(b) and (e), expanding it, not rebuilding it from a blocked program. There is no record that Section 1006 was ever enjoined by any court.

That correction changes the argument. ILCMA is not a race-conscious program rebuilt in race-neutral language to survive a court order. It is a different, always race-neutral provision in the same statute, one announced in 2023 and terminated in 2026 under a rationale, anti-DEI language in the grant paperwork, that had nothing to do with how the program was actually built. The $127 million restored in June 2026 sits inside a longer record, from Pigford’s 1999 consent decree to this year, of courts repeatedly ordering USDA, under different legal theories, to stop being the reason farmers of color lost land. They are two fights in the same long argument, a generation apart, connected by history and not by statute.

What the injunction does not close

Twenty-five of the forty-nine terminated grants belong to organizations that were not party to this suit. The record does not show what happens to those. They may be restored administratively, alongside the twenty-four. They may not be. The injunction covers the plaintiffs before the court. It is not, on its face, a resolution for the program.

USDA must comply under a preliminary injunction while litigation continues. It is bound on the one statutory point Judge Howell reached first, not because the plaintiffs won every claim. Discovery continues, including the request for the origin of the search terms. On July 15, 2026, the Department of Justice asked the D.C. Circuit to stay the injunction, arguing the case belongs in the Court of Federal Claims: a jurisdictional argument, not a defense of the terminations on the merits. As of July 28, 2026, no public ruling on that stay motion has been located. That is a live docket, not a closed one, and a status this record cannot verify is not a status this record will assert.

Jason Grimm, executive director at Iowa Valley RC&D, one of the restored grantees, doesn’t believe the program will survive.

The plaintiffs’ own legal team struck a different note. “We are grateful for this ruling,” said Scott Carlson, executive director of the Farmers Justice Center, one of the organizations representing the plaintiffs. “The court has again protected farmers, rural America, and farm organizations from the harm this Administration is trying to cause them.” Carrie Apfel of Earthjustice read the ruling as a boundary marker: “USDA cannot use its anti-DEI policies to terminate congressionally authorized investments that provide equitable access to land, capital, and markets.” The boundary has been drawn twice now, in the same courtroom, against the same defendant: first, in August 2025, primarily on arbitrary-and-capricious grounds; then, in June 2026, on a statutory ground alone. Whether the deeper question, how the terminations were actually decided, is ever answered on this record is not yet a fact. As of the court’s own July 14 order, USDA had made only minimal progress toward answering it.