The ruling
U.S. District Judge Claire C. Cecchi of the District of New Jersey denied a joint motion by the Department of Justice and Lakeland Bank to terminate a 2022 consent order and dismiss the underlying case, in an opinion issued around August 1 and reported August 3. The government had alleged that Lakeland engaged in a pattern of unlawful redlining between 2015 and 2021, avoiding home loans and mortgage services in majority-Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in and around Newark, and discouraging residents of those areas from applying for credit — claims brought under the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. The parties settled in September 2022 with a five-year consent order.
Cecchi found the bank had not yet met the order's terms, singling out an unfinished obligation to fund a $12 million loan-subsidy program: more than $4 million of that fund remained undisbursed. "A promise to reach substantial compliance in the future is not substantial compliance," she wrote, denying the motion without prejudice. The consent order therefore remains in force until September 2027, its original five-year term.
Who is actually bound
Lakeland Bank was acquired by Provident Financial Services in a deal that closed May 16, 2024, and Provident assumed responsibility for the consent order's requirements, according to court filings. A Provident spokesman, Keith A. Buscio, said the company remained "committed to fulfilling the terms of the original consent order with the Department of Justice." The Trump administration and Lakeland/Provident had jointly argued the bank had "substantially complied" with the order's reforms, which include opening a branch in a historically underserved Newark neighborhood and conducting outreach and fair-lending training in affected communities, in addition to the loan-subsidy fund.
The original 2022 settlement, beyond the $12 million loan-subsidy fund, required Lakeland to open two new branches in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, at least one within Newark itself; to dedicate at least four mortgage loan officers to serving neighborhoods throughout the Newark area; to employ a full-time Community Development Officer overseeing lending in those neighborhoods; and to expand its Community Reinvestment Act assessment area to include Essex, Somerset and Union counties, according to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division case summary. The underlying complaint alleged that from at least 2015 to 2021 all of Lakeland's branches were located in majority-white neighborhoods and that its loan officers did not serve the credit needs of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in and around Newark.
Three fair-housing organizations — the New Jersey Citizen Action Education Fund, the Housing Equality Center of Pennsylvania, and the National Fair Housing Alliance — opposed the termination motion as amici curiae, represented by the Public Interest Law Center and Stapleton Segal Cochran LLC. They had first raised objections when the administration signaled its intent to seek early termination roughly a year earlier.
Context and status
The case originated under a 2022 settlement negotiated when Philip Sellinger, a Democratic appointee, was the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey; the Trump administration's later attempt to unwind it before the government's own consent decree expired drew criticism from fair-housing advocates who called it inconsistent with the department's own prior findings. NJCAEF Executive Director Dena Mottola Jaborska said it was "unconscionable that the Department of Justice even attempted to vacate its own consent order."
As of the ruling, the order's marketing-spend requirement — $150,000 a year, plus $750,000 for advertising and outreach and $400,000 for community partnerships under the original settlement — and its remaining subsidy-fund disbursements continue to run under court supervision through September 2027, with Provident, not the now-dissolved Lakeland, responsible for compliance.