Hundreds of lawyers and other staff have left the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division as veterans at the office say they have been kicked out by Trump administration officials who want to quit their traditional jobs to actively pursue lawsuits against the Ivy League, other schools and liberal cities.
The recent wave has accelerated as management resumes its “deferred resignation programme.” The offer is intended for people working in the department and expires Monday. It is expected that more than 100 lawyers will take it in addition to the previous departure raft, which corresponds to a class fault in a key part of the Department of Justice.
“We’ve now decided that more than 100 lawyers have decided they don’t want their work to do what they need, and I think that’s fine,” Harmet K. Dhillon, the department’s new head, told the weekend in an interview with conservative commentator Glenn Beck, welcoming sales and department priorities.
“We don’t want federal people to feel their pet projects aren’t going to persecute,” she said. “The job here is to enforce federal civil rights laws without awakening ideology.”
Traditionally, the sector has protected the constitutional rights of minority communities and marginalized people, often by monitoring police stations for civil rights violations, protecting voting rights and combating housing discrimination.
Currently, more than dozens of current and former civil rights lawyers appear to be intended by the new administration, rather than simply changing the direction of work, as typical during the change from a Democrat to a Republican.
Instead, the administration said it was fundamentally decided to end how the celebrity of divisions have functioned since its establishment during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s, and become the enforcement division of President Trump’s agenda for state and local officials, university administrators and student protesters.
When many lawyers in the department are set to stay and are sure their work is the first Trump terminology, and are convinced they change priorities but not wholesale changes, that is a surprising change since the start of the Second Trump administration.
Until recently, the Civil Rights Division was not facing the intense pressure that other parts of the Justice Department had to face in the early days of its administration. The Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Sector was one of the first sections to begin receiving ultimatums from the political leadership of the department.
These requests were so favoured by the people who worked there that the staff of over 20 lawyers were reduced to just a handful.
When Trump took office in January, the Civil Rights Division had around 380 lawyers, according to current and former Justice Department officials. Based on an informal estimate of the number of people planning to resign before the deadline on Monday, the department will soon leave around 140 lawyers, or perhaps fewer duties. According to current and former staff, this figure is roughly similar to non-lawyer support staff in the department.
This departure increased as departmental political appointees reassigned the few remaining career managers in the department. Lawyer Rhine worried that their work responsibilities would soon slip into a chaotic daily scramble.
Banita Gupta, who ran the division during the Obama administration and served as a Justice Department official during the Biden administration, warned that ongoing changes were indicating a wider transformation. “This is not just a change in enforcement priorities. The department has its head up and is now being used as a weapon against the very community that has been established to protect,” she said.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
Within the Civil Rights Division, it is common for government changes to be withdrawn or in some cases started.
Current and former Justice Department officials say, in themselves, these types of decisions are not particularly surprising. But the way Attorney General Pam Bondy and Dillon announced such a decision have warned many of the people working there.
According to current and former lawyers, it is not just a changed priorities, but the very purpose of the department itself. They point to a series of new mission statements introduced this month, saying they can’t recognize key parts of the department’s work.
Stacey Young, who once worked as a lawyer in the department, was executive director of Justice Connection, a former department official organization, and issued a warning about the outcome.
“With the reckless demolition of this department, she will “recognize that there are no constitutional and constitutional violations of schools, housing, employment, voting, prisons and many other areas of our daily lives,” she said.
The agency’s political leaders say their mission is to end the “weaponization” of the sector against conservatives and end the “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion within and outside the government. The Trump administration’s buzzword, “illegal day,” is particularly disrupting employees in departments that have long been working to ensure equal protection under the law.
Last week, Dillon announced that the department had withdrawn court applications in two cases involving transgender prison prison prisoners. Given the current position on issues of the administration, it was expected to be withdrawn. However, when announcing the move, a senior Justice Department official accused the agency itself of abused the legal system.
“The previous administration’s debate in transgender prison cases was based on junk science,” Dillon said. “The meaningless reading of the previous administration’s Disabled Persons Act was exactly what people were humiliated by laws intended to protect.”
A few weeks ago, Bondi also used caustic language to say he would drop the Biden-era law to the bureau, which 2021 Georgia law accused of discriminatory review of election procedures. “The Georgians deserve a safe election and an unfake claim of false voters’ suppression intended to divide us,” she said.
Northeastern University professor Matthew B. Ross said he heard from the department’s lawyers he worked with him that he was leaving, as he often serves as an expert witness in cases where the department reaches a consent form to reform the local police station.
Within the Division, there was debate about abolishing long-standing consent orders with police departments and loosening gun restrictions in cases against liberal cities, according to people familiar with the debate.
Ross described the departure as a “large book of Exodus.”
“We are taking several steps in modernizing the law enforcement of this country, which is a huge disappointment,” Ross said. “A lot of the work the civil rights sector actually does is to raise these police agencies to the latest standards,” he said, too, with simple goals like replacing paper shapes with searchable computer data.
Given the number of people leaving the division, he said, “It is not clear how they will adhere to existing agreements.”
The concerns of career staff within the department are not just that much of their traditional work has been abandoned. Current and former staff say Dillon and other political appointees in the department have pushed the department to embark on Trump administration’s priorities that appear to not line up with current anti-differentiation laws or decades-old precedents surrounding those laws.
For example, a small number of civil rights lawyers have been sent to the Ministry of Health and Human Services, according to people familiar with the conditions of anonymity that describes internal personnel moves, an order investigating anti-Semitism, including campus protests against Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip.
Specifically, these studies aim to focus on medical schools. Because the federal government can withhold a significant amount of the grants given to them. These people said the Trump administration views it as a key form of leverage for determining new standards for campus conduct.
Another handful of lawyers have been reassigned within the Department of Justice to tackle issues including anti-Semitism on university campuses. This is a task that also appears to focus on investigating student protests and how university officials dealt with them.
And another group of civil rights lawyers has been assigned to tackle cases for the Trump administration’s stated goal of protecting women in colleges and schools.
In an interview with Beck, Dillon suggested that he plans to hire him promptly to pursue such cases.
Otherwise, she said, “We’ll run out of lawyers.”
