The Trump administration has dropped a Biden-era case against a chemical manufacturer accused of contributing to increased cancer risks in a predominantly Black community near its plant in Louisiana.

The Justice Department said Friday that it had filed a notice of dismissal in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Louisiana in the government’s case against the Denka Performance Elastomer plant a synthetic rubber manufacturing facility in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana.

The move ends one of the Biden administration’s most high-profile efforts to ensure that poor and minority communities were protected from disproportionate levels of toxic pollution. The Trump administration on Friday called that agenda “radical.”

Adam Gustafson, an acting assistant attorney general, said in a statement that the dismissal of the case reflected a “renewed commitment to enforce environmental laws as Congress intended — consistently, fairly and without regard to race.”

The Biden administration filed the lawsuit against Denka in 2023 after regulators determined that the plant’s emissions of chloroprene, a likely carcinogen, were contributing to health concerns in an area with the highest cancer risk of any place in the U.S., and demanded the facility reduce its pollution levels.

After the Justice Department began the legal process of dropping the case with a filing Wednesday, environmental advocates accused the Trump administration of abandoning vulnerable communities.

“The American people did not vote to let corporate polluters get away with violating the law and making the air unsafe to breathe,” said Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group. Dismissing the case, she said, “should raise alarm bells for communities across the country.”

Denka, a Japanese company that acquired the plant from DuPont in 2015, issued a statement early Friday calling the Trump administration’s decision “a long-overdue and appropriate end to a case lacking scientific and legal merit from the start.”

The company said the facility’s emissions were at a historical low after Denka invested more than $35 million in pollution controls and other measures. It called the government’s scientific assessments of the cancer risk of chloroprene “exaggerated.”

Chloroprene is used to produce neoprene, a synthetic rubber that is found in automotive parts, hoses, drink cozies, orthopedic braces and electric cables. The Environmental Protection Agency identified chloroprene as a likely human carcinogen in 2010.

In 2023, the EPA and the Justice Department sued Denka, arguing that the Louisiana plant posed an “imminent and substantial endangerment to public health and welfare,” and should be compelled to reduce its emissions.

The plant is in LaPlace, Louisiana, an industrial stretch of the state between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that is known as “Cancer Alley” because of its high concentration of petrochemical plants and refineries. Air monitors at the Denka facility had revealed long-term exposure levels up to 15 times higher than the recommended limits for lifetime exposure.

In announcing the lawsuit two years ago, the E.P.A. said that it had found that children younger than 18 accounted for about 20% of the population living within 2-1/2 miles of the Denka plant. More than 300 children who attended an elementary school less than 500 feet from the Denka facility had been exposed to chloroprene emissions, the agency said.

“People living next door to this plant have really been let down,” said Eric Schaeffer, a former director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s civil enforcement office. The Trump administration, he said, “is not interested in enforcing environmental laws.”

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In dismissing the case Friday, the Justice Department said the lawsuit was part of a “diversity, equity and inclusion” agenda, which the Trump administration is eliminating throughout the government.

Environmental justice, however, is the effort to ensure all communities have equal levels of environmental protection.

The case was dropped days after President Donald Trump in a joint address to Congress cited childhood cancer rates. Trump said his administration would prioritize addressing that issue and “get toxins out of our environment.” The White House declined to comment on the Denka case.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.