No one who followed Donald Trump's presidential campaign expected him to become a champion of civil rights once he occupied the White House. Still, the speed with which the Trump administration is dismantling the regulatory structure that protects basic civil rights is alarming.

Beginning with his attempt to impose a ban on travelers from six Muslim-majority nations and continuing to a systematic budget assault on civil rights agencies within the government, Trump and his staff have made their intentions clear. They're willing to sacrifice a few American freedoms in the name of security, and they have little patience for the civil rights protections the Obama administration built into federal departments and agencies.

"What the hell do you have to lose?" Trump asked African-American and Hispanic voters during his campaign. Now they and everyone else have the answer: quite a bit.

His proposed ban on refugees and immigrants from six predominantly Muslim countries has now run afoul of appeals courts in two separate judicial circuits. Next stop for this test of the First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty will be the Supreme Court.

Trump's proposed budget would make sweeping cuts to civil rights offices throughout the executive branch. The Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance, which monitors affirmative action and equal-opportunity rules for companies that do business with the government, would all but disappear. A similar office that oversees programs in the Department of Education would see a big staff cut. Civil rights programs within the Department of Health and Human Services would see a 17 percent budget cut.

The Justice Department's Office of Civil Rights Enforcement would be scaled back. Attorney General Jeff Sessions already has ordered a review of federal consent decrees with police departments charged with violating civil rights. The Office of Community Oriented Police Services would be cut back. The Justice Department has backed away from pursuing voting rights challenges.

In late March, Trump revoked the Fair Play and Safe Workplaces order that President Barack Obama had put in place by executive order in 2014. It required that companies with federal contracts comply with 14 labor and civil rights laws. The abrupt change in civil rights from Obama to Trump invokes images of crash-test dummies in a car hitting a wall: catastrophic deceleration.

Conservative lawyers and think tanks argue that a course correction was overdue. In a letter to Sessions, two dozen lawyers accused the Justice Department's Office of Civil Rights Enforcement of "ideological rot."

But Vinita Gupta, who headed that office from 2014 until January — and who ran the DOJ investigation into the Ferguson Police Department — told the Washington Post, "They can call it a course correction, but there's little question that it's a rollback of civil rights across the board."

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH