- Justice Department civil rights unit takes on conservative priorities
- Changes expected to push out career lawyers
The Justice Department’s civil rights division under President Donald Trump has announced investigations into universities and gun rights and launched a task force dedicated to rooting out anti-Christian bias while dropping landmark civil rights settlements.
Division leaders have also pushed out more than a dozen career lawyers, including at least three chiefs of sections that handle police brutality cases and disability and voting rights, while announcing new mission statements mirroring Trump’s executive orders.
The changes align with the administration’s ideological priorities, while radically departing from the history of a division established during the Civil Rights Movement to guard the right to vote. They also highlight the extent to which the division, now led by Trump’s former personal lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, may be taking its cues from the White House.
“These shifts represent a shocking departure from the civil rights division’s core purpose,” said Chiraag Bains, who has served as both a career prosecutor and political appointee in the civil rights division. “Rather than protecting all Americans from discrimination, this administration is essentially commanding federal attorneys to enforce a narrow political agenda that actually undermines civil rights protections.”
The sudden changes have made career attorneys, who are hired through a nonpartisan process and work through multiple administrations, more inclined to take the administration’s latest deferred resignation offer, which would allow them to go on leave and eventually resign.
One current division employee predicted only several dozen attorneys could be left in the civil rights division’s civil litigating sections—normally staffed with hundreds of lawyers—if deferred resignation offers are all approved.
“They are demolishing the civil rights division and repurposing it for something it’s not meant to do,” the employee said.
With the initial deferred resignation offer, “there was a lot of wait and see,” said Johnathan Smith, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
“Now, people have waited, they have seen.”
The Justice Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Dhillon said in an interview Sunday with conservative commentator Glenn Beck that the division’s priorities under Trump “are going to be somewhat different than they were under President Biden,” and that “over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do.”
“That’s fine. We need to replace those people, because I have a very robust affirmative civil rights agenda that I think many Americans will be pleased with,” she said.
New Missions
New mission statements distributed to sections earlier this month and obtained by Bloomberg Law reflect the division’s shifting priorities.
The housing and civil enforcement section’s statement directs it to protect military service members and religious groups’ zoning and land use while omitting reference to the Fair Housing Act, the 1968 law that prohibits housing discrimination.
Similarly, the special litigation section, which historically protected civil rights for people interacting with police and the prison system, among other missions, emphasizes plans to shield pro-life protesters and prayer vigils from discrimination and to end diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Particularly unusual is the mission statements’ references to recent White House orders aimed at eradicating anti-Christian bias, combatting antisemitism, defending women from “general ideology extremism,” and prohibiting transgender women from participating in women’s sports, former civil rights division officials said.
“The executive orders cited seem to have little to do with the core work of the division over all of these years, and to some extent, reflect principles that seem in tension with the core work of the division,” said Jennifer Mathis, a former deputy assistant attorney general.
The outcome-first approach—to start with a priority population, rather than to first investigate who is most impacted—is a “completely backwards way to approach doing the work,” Smith said.
During the Obama administration, the division spoke to religious groups across the US to learn which populations faced the most religious discrimination, Smith said.
“They’re cherry picking certain groups that are not facing as much discrimination as others, but that they want to emphasize that they are standing up for,” Bains said.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said in April 22 remarks, announcing a task force to fight anti-Christian bias, that such a focus “is not favoritism,” but rather is “upholding the rule of law and fulfilling the constitutional promise.”
Litigation Shifts
In line with these new priorities, the Justice Department has moved to dismiss, or withdraw from, existing litigation and settlements brought during the Biden administration, while announcing new investigations into antisemitism on college campuses and processing delays for concealed carry permits in Los Angeles.
Shortly after being sworn in earlier this month, Dhillon announced the department was terminating an already-reached settlement in a case involving wastewater systems in a rural Alabama county.
The department had found, under the prior administration, that the county had engaged in a pattern of neglect regarding health risks of raw sewage that disproportionately impacted Black residents. Dhillon described it as an “environmental justice” matter and said the department will no longer push those issues “through a distorting, DEI lens.”
Robert Weiner, former senior counsel for the civil rights division who helped oversee that investigation, questioned why the administration would withdraw from a deal he described as noncontroversial that helped Black residents.
“They were people who were poor and were in dire situations, and they happened to be Black, and they were discriminated against based on all of their circumstances,” he said. “It’s really shameful.”
‘Not Wanted’
The shift has prompted an exodus—some voluntary, others not—of top career managers.
Earlier this month, the section chief of the educational opportunities section, which is now tasked with enforcing orders to exclude transgender athletes and opposing DEI efforts, resigned, as did the section chief and deputy for the appellate section.
More recently, the division forcibly reassigned more than a dozen of its lawyers, including at least three section chiefs, to temporary details in the complaint adjudication and Freedom of Information Act offices, according to people familiar with the transfers.
“The message of mission statements, the message of the deferred resignation, all of that says, you don’t matter. Your expertise doesn’t matter, that you’re not wanted here,” Smith said.
Stacey Young, a former attorney with the division who founded Justice Connection, to support current and former DOJ employees, said the recent reassignments have had “a very destabilizing effect” on the career workforce, and the resignations that result will cause the division “to lose an immense amount of institutional knowledge.”
“I’ve never heard my former colleagues sound so defeated and scared for the future of their work, and also their own jobs. There’s enormous fear and anxiety about the division’s future,” Young said.