The head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division has rewritten a mission statement to prioritize enforcement of President Trump’s culture war edicts, including participation of transgender women in sports, in what appears to be a break from its founding purpose of fighting race-based discrimination.
In an email, Harmeet Dhillon, a conservative activist close to the White House who leads the unit, directed the division’s career work force to pursue the president’s agenda, outlined in executive orders and presidential memorandums, or face unspecified consequences. The revised statement encouraged investigations into antisemitism, anti-Christian bias and noncompliance with a range of Trump executive fiats.
“The zealous and faithful pursuit of this section’s mission requires the full dedication of this section’s resources, attention and energy to the priorities of the president,” Ms. Dhillon wrote. The memo, obtained by The New York Times, was addressed to the division’s enforcement arm responsible for prohibiting discrimination by recipients of federal funds — nearly every local government entity in the country.
A Justice Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
She did not explicitly say she would not open investigations into racial discrimination, but Ms. Dhillon and the interim leadership that preceded her arrival this month have already moved to reverse a handful of high-profile Biden-era actions.
Last week, she nullified a 2022 agreement with an impoverished Alabama county intended to address troubling disparities in the quality of drinking water, infrastructure to protect residents from flooding and sewer systems for Black and white residents.
“The D.O.J. will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, D.E.I. lens,” Ms. Dhillon said in a statement announcing the action last week. “Americans deserve a government committed to serving every individual with dignity and respect, and to expending taxpayer resources in accordance with the national interest, not arbitrary criteria.”
On March 27, the department’s political leadership repurposed a pivotal tool used to address police violence against minorities — so-called pattern-or-practice investigations — to challenge gun control measures enacted by Los Angeles, which, in the administration’s view, violated residents’ Second Amendment rights.
In her email this week, Ms. Dhillon directed her staff to pursue cases based on seven executive orders dealing with a range of culture war issues, including three addressing transgender women’s participation in sports and another declaring English to be the country’s official language.
The executive branch, as the Justice Department’s “sole client,” had an obligation to “administer and enforce” all directives from the White House without dissent, Ms. Dhillon wrote.
Ms. Dhillon’s marching orders, while expected, represent an abrupt U-turn for a celebrated division that has been at the center of fights for racial equality for decades.
Since its creation in 1957, the division — working closely with Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders during the apex of its influence in the 1960s and ’70s — was instrumental in dismantling Jim Crow segregation, prosecuting crimes against Black people and other minorities, and expanding voting rights.
Its muscle has often grown under Democratic presidents, then waned under Republican administrations. What appears different this time is the determination of Ms. Dhillon, whose law firm supported Mr. Trump’s legal effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, to repurpose its mission to serve the president’s agenda in a more vigorous way, according to current and former department officials.
Much of the division’s leverage comes from a section of the 1964 civil rights law, Title VI, that allows the federal government to withhold funding from localities that violate the constitutional rights of their citizens.
Ms. Dhillon’s shift “fundamentally alters the mission” of the division by pressuring career lawyers to pursue political objectives, said Vanita Gupta, a former head of the unit under President Barack Obama who served as a top Justice Department official in the Biden administration.
“It is highly significant and represents the weaponization of the Justice Department against the very civil rights principles that undergirded Title VI, in pursuit of a highly politicized and anti-civil-rights agenda,” she said in an interview.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
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