The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights dismissed more than 3,400 complaints from March 11 to June 27—a figure that advocates say is unprecedented and concerning.

The data, included in court filings last week that Politico first reported on, offers a glimpse into the office’s work after Education Secretary Linda McMahon laid off nearly half of OCR’s employees and shuttered seven regional offices. A federal judge has since blocked those layoffs and ordered the department to bring the fired employees back.

Advocates, students and families have argued that the layoffs hollowed out OCR and left the agency unable to protect students’ civil rights. In court filings and public statements, department officials have countered that the layoffs are meant to reduce waste in the agency and that OCR is able to continue its statutorily required functions.

“OCR has taken unprecedented steps to streamline its functions according to demand: for example, amid a growing volume of Title IX complaints, OCR partnered with the Department of Justice to expeditiously investigate sex-based discrimination claims,” agency spokesperson Julie Hartman told Politico. “OCR’s daily accomplishments under the Trump Administration disprove the rampant fear-mongering by irresponsible media, and evince that OCR is vigorously upholding its responsibilities to protect all Americans’ civil rights.”

Since March 11, OCR received 4,833 complaints and opened 309 investigations, according to the filing from Rachel Oglesby, the department’s chief of staff. OCR also started 26 of what the office calls “directed investigations,” which aren’t based on a specific complaint. Another 3,424 complaints were dismissed “consistent with OCR’s Case Processing Manual,” a 32-page document that outlines how the office handles complaints and investigations. According to the manual, complaints can be dismissed if they fail to state a violation of the law or if they lack sufficient factual detail about the alleged discrimination.

OCR also continues to wrap up investigations, ending inquiries into 96 complaints after finding insufficient evidence and resolving 290 complaints through voluntary agreements, settlements or technical assistance.

That’s a slower pace than the Biden administration, said Catherine Lhamon, who led OCR under former president Joe Biden. She said that during the last three months of the Biden administration, OCR had 595 mediated or voluntary resolutions, dismissed 2,527 cases and found no violation in 119 cases. (Biden officials regularly said OCR needed more staff to keep up with a growing caseload.)

“The dismissals are high and the case-resolution numbers are low, and I understand the resolutions they count reflect work completed before the [reduction in force],” she said, adding that the 290 resolutions “reflect a shocking diminution of work output from the office.”

Oglesby didn’t provide any more information about why the complaints were dismissed or what types of violations they focused on. The department usually releases more information about OCR’s complaints and investigations as part of an annual report and in the budget process. The Trump administration has proposed slashing OCR’s budget from $140 million to $91 million. Federal officials have previously pledged to clear OCR’s “massive backlog” in cases this year.

Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us, a national organization working to combat campus sexual assault, said that during the first Trump administration, advocates saw “a marked slowdown” in case-processing times. The department also dismissed complaints, but “it was never to this degree,” she said.

“The sheer volume of cases that have been dismissed in the last few months is just unprecedented and egregious, and it begs the question of who is making these decisions and under what guidance or what part of the case-processing manual are they using to justify it?” she said.

To Vitchers, the complaint dismissals are “an unsurprising outcome” of the layoffs, which likely meant longer investigations unless the department managed to “rightsize the workload of the remaining staff.”

She worries that paring down OCR is part of Trump’s goal to shut down the department, but she acknowledged that she doesn’t know exactly what is driving the dismissals due to the department’s “lack of transparency.”

“At the end of the day, what this means is that there are at least 3,400 incidents, if not more, where a student or students felt that they were being harmed … [and] the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights outright dismissed their claim,” she said. “The outcome is that the student has once again faced betrayal by an institution that they thought that they could trust to support their rights.”