Civil rights lawyers leave en masse as Justice Department mission shifts

The new head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division is dramatically reshaping the office to propel President Donald Trump’s social agenda, prompting the departure of about half of the division’s lawyers in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the situation and public statements from top officials.

Since being sworn in this month, civil rights director Harmeet K. Dhillon has redirected her staff to focus on combating antisemitism, the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports and what Trump and his allies have described as anti-Christian bias and the Democrats’ “woke ideology.”

The division changed mission statements across its sections to focus less on racial discrimination and more on fighting diversity initiatives. And department officials reassigned more than a dozen career staffers — including section chiefs overseeing police brutality, disability and voting rights cases — to areas outside their legal expertise.

The changes under Dhillon, a longtime Republican activist, coincide with a second White House offer to federal workers that allows them to resign from their positions and be paid through September. The deadline for that offer was late Monday evening, and civil rights employees have been submitting their resignations en masse as the deadline neared, said people familiar with the division who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

More than 100 division attorneys have already said they will leave their jobs, Dhillon told conservative podcaster Glenn Beck during an appearance on his show Saturday. Many departed because they disagree with the division’s new direction, she said.

The division had about 380 attorneys when Trump began his second term in the White House. Approximately half have left or said they will leave, according to people familiar with the division, and Dhillon told Beck she had no problem with their departures.

“I think that’s fine,” Dhillon said. “We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute police departments based on statistical evidence or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence. … The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws — not woke ideology.”

The civil rights division was established in 1957 as part of the Civil Rights Act, which focused on fighting racial discrimination. Since its launch, the division has been tasked with upholding “the civil and constitutional rights of all persons in the United States, particularly some of the most vulnerable members of our society,” according to the Justice Department’s website.

The office has 11 sections that aim to combat discrimination in educational opportunities, housing, employment, voting and more. Some civil rights advocates fear Dhillon’s changes could amount to an abandonment of the division’s founding mission.

“For almost 70 years, the civil rights division has enforced laws that Congress passed to promote equality, dignity and fairness for all Americans,” said Stacey Young, a former civil rights attorney who left this year and founded Justice Connection, an advocacy organization for former Justice Department employees. “By effectively purging the vast majority of the division’s lawyers, DOJ is grinding this work to a near halt.”

Within the Justice Department, it is the civil rights division that usually experiences the sharpest swings in ideological priorities during transitions between Republican and Democratic administrations. But several former officials interviewed by The Washington Post described the shifts implemented so far by Dhillon and other political appointees at Justice as more extreme than anticipated.

In the first Trump administration, former Justice Department officials said, the division was largely left intact. The section did not pursue actions against police departments in the way that recent Democratic administrations had done, but it continued to focus on prosecuting hate crimes, protecting disability rights and enforcing employment laws.

Since Trump’s second inauguration, nearly every civil rights section has been upended, the people familiar with the situation said. The immigrant and employee rights section is now primarily focused on ensuring that foreign workers are not favored over U.S. citizens in job opportunities. Attorneys once dispatched to ensure education facilities are not discriminating against minority groups are now concentrating much of their resources on ensuring those institutions are not being antisemitic.

One exception is the division’s criminal section, which prosecutes hate crimes, human trafficking and other cases and has been largely left intact. It has not seen the same exodus as other sections.

In one of her first acts, Dhillon changed the mission statements for many of division offices to align with Trump executive orders with titles such as “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” and “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.”

Speaking on Beck’s podcast, Dhillon said she intended to send the message to her new staff: “These are the president’s priorities. This is what we will be focusing on. Govern yourself accordingly.”

“This is not simply a change in enforcement priorities that comes with a change in administration — the division has been turned on its head and is now being used as a weapon against the very communities it was established to protect,” said Vanita Gupta, who was associate attorney general during the Biden administration and director of the civil rights division under President Barack Obama. “The mass exodus that this has triggered is unprecedented and also understandable.”

The changes in the division began before Dhillon took over. In the first weeks of the Trump administration, Justice Department officials ordered the division to pause most of the investigative activity launched during the Biden administration, pending reviews by new leadership. Many top leaders were removed from their positions. In addition, Trump’s appointees launched a multiagency task force housed within the civil rights division to combat antisemitism.

Dhillon has pledged more of the same. And in line with her new priorities, the Justice Department has withdrawn or moved to dismiss Biden-era court filings and cases alleging discriminatory electoral practices in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and supporting protections for transgender prison inmates. Dhillon derided the latter in a statement as “politically motivated and based on junk science.”

Dhillon, in her appearance on Beck’s podcast, acknowledged that recent departures had — for the moment — affected the resources her division could bring to bear on its newly established priorities.

“We’re going to run out of attorneys to work on these things at some point,” she quipped. Still, she added, the civil rights division was looking to hire new lawyers.

“I care that they’re willing to take direction and zealously enforce the civil rights of the United States, according to their priorities of the president,” Dhillon said.