Hundreds of lawyers and other staff members are leaving the Justice Department’s civil rights division, as veterans of the office say they have been driven out by Trump administration officials who want to drop its traditional work to aggressively pursue cases against the Ivy League, other schools and liberal cities.
The wave of departures has only accelerated in recent days, as the administration reopened its “deferred resignation program,” which would allow employees to resign but continue to be paid for a period of time. The offer, for those who work in the division, expires on Monday. More than 100 lawyers are expected to take it, on top of a raft of earlier departures, in what would amount to a decimation of the ranks of a crucial part of the Justice Department.
“Now, over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do, and I think that’s fine,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the new head of the division, said in an interview with the conservative commentator Glenn Beck over the weekend, welcoming the turnover and making plain the division’s priorities.
“We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute” police departments, she said. “The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.”
Traditionally the department has protected the constitutional rights of minority communities and marginalized people, often by monitoring police departments for civil rights violations, protecting the right to vote and fighting housing discrimination.
Now, more than a dozen current and former civil rights division lawyers say, the new administration appears intent on not simply modifying the direction of the work, as has been typical during changeovers from a Democratic administration to a Republican one.
The administration is instead determined, the lawyers said, to fundamentally end how the storied division has functioned since it was established during the Eisenhower administration, becoming an enforcement arm for President Trump’s agenda against state and local officials, college administrators and student protesters, among others.
It is a remarkable shift from the start of the second Trump administration, when many lawyers in the division planned to stay on, confident that their work would be much like it was in the first Trump term, with shifting priorities but not wholesale changes.
Until recently, the civil rights division had not faced the kind of intense pressure from above that other parts of the Justice Department had to confront in the early days of the administration. The criminal division’s public integrity section was one of the first to start receiving ultimatums from the department’s political leadership.
Those demands were so objectionable to the people who worked there that it became a section in name only, having its staff of about 20 lawyers reduced to a handful.
When Mr. Trump took office in January, there were around 380 lawyers in the civil rights division, according to current and former Justice Department officials. Based on unofficial estimates of the number of people planning to resign by Monday’s deadline, the division would soon be left with about 140 attorneys, or possibly fewer. The figures are roughly similar for the nonlawyer support staff in the division, according to current and former officials.
The departures have also increased as political appointees at the department reassign the few remaining career managers at the division, leaving line attorneys worried that their work responsibilities are quickly sliding into a chaotic daily scramble in which it is unclear on any given day who their boss will be.
Vanita Gupta, who ran the division during the Obama administration and served as a senior Justice Department official during the Biden administration, warned that the changes underway signaled a broader transformation. “This is not simply a change in enforcement priorities — 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,” she said.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
Within the civil rights division, it is commonplace for some cases to be dropped, or for some cases to be initiated, with the change in administrations.
In and of themselves, current and former Justice Department officials say, those types of decisions are not particularly surprising. But the way Attorney General Pam Bondi and Ms. Dhillon have announced such decisions has alarmed many who work there.
It is not just the priorities that have changed, but the very purpose of the division itself, according to current and former lawyers. They pointed to a set of new mission statements introduced this month that they say make major parts of the division’s work unrecognizable.
Stacey Young, who once worked in the division as a lawyer and is now the executive director of Justice Connection, an organization of former department officials, voiced alarm about the consequences.
“With the reckless dismantling of the division,” she said, “we’ll see unchecked discrimination and constitutional violations in schools, housing, employment, voting, prisons, by police departments and in many other realms of our daily lives.”
The agency’s political leaders say their mission is to end the “weaponization” of the department against conservatives, and end “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion inside and outside government. “Illegal D.E.I.,” which is a buzzword of the Trump administration, is particularly confusing to employees in the division whose jobs have long been to ensure equal protection under the law.
Last week, Ms. Dhillon announced that the division was withdrawing court filings in two cases related to transgender prison inmates. Given the current administration’s position on the issue, the withdrawals were expected. But in announcing the move, senior Justice Department officials accused the agency itself of having abused the legal system.
“The prior administration’s arguments in transgender inmate cases were based on junk science,” Ms. Dhillon said. “The prior administration’s nonsensical reading of the Americans With Disabilities Act was an affront to the very people the statute intended to protect.”
Weeks earlier, Ms. Bondi used similarly caustic language in stating that the department would drop a Biden-era lawsuit that charged that a 2021 Georgia law overhauling election procedures was discriminatory. “Georgians deserve secure elections, not fabricated claims of false voter suppression meant to divide us,” she said.
Matthew B. Ross, a professor at Northeastern University who often serves as an expert witness in cases in which the department reaches consent decrees to reform local police departments, said he had heard from lawyers in the division he had worked with that they would be leaving.
Inside the division, there have been discussions about scrapping long-established consent decrees with police departments and instead bringing cases against liberal cities to loosen their gun restrictions, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Mr. Ross described the departures as a “mass exodus,” one that will have far-reaching consequences.
“We’re going multiple steps backwards in terms of modernizing law enforcement in this country, and it’s quite unfortunate,” Mr. Ross said. “A lot of the work that the civil rights division is actually doing is getting these police agencies up to a modern standard,” even on simple goals like replacing paper forms with searchable computer data.
Given how many people are leaving the division, he said, “it’s not clear how they are even going to comply with the existing consent decrees.”
The concerns of career staff members inside the division are not simply that much of their traditional work is being abandoned. Current and former staff members say Ms. Dhillon and other political appointees in the department have pushed the division to embark on priorities of the Trump administration that do not appear to line up with current anti-discrimination laws or the decades of precedents surrounding those laws.
For instance, a handful of civil rights lawyers have been sent to the Department of Health and Human Services, with orders to investigate antisemitism involving campus protests against Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip, according to people familiar with the assignments who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal personnel moves.
Specifically, those investigations are meant to focus on medical schools, because the federal government can withhold sizable sums of grant money that goes to them. The Trump administration, these people said, sees the money as a key form of leverage to dictate new standards for campus conduct.
Another handful of lawyers have been reassigned within the Justice Department to work on issues involving antisemitism on college campuses, a task that also appears to be focused on investigating student protests and how university officials dealt with them, these people said.
And another group of civil rights lawyers have been assigned to work on cases for the Trump administration’s stated goal of protecting women at colleges and schools — which is how the administration describes its efforts to prevent transgender students from playing women’s sports.
In her interview with Mr. Beck, Ms. Dhillon suggested that she planned to hire quickly to pursue such cases.
Otherwise, she said, “we’re going to run out of attorneys.”
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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