President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape the Justice Department’s civil rights division to target those who stand in the way of his agenda have triggered a “mass exodus.”
Hundreds of veteran lawyers and other staff members are leaving, The New York Times reported Monday, alarmed by the Trump administration’s push to overhaul the agency’s office charged with defending constitutional rights.
Of the roughly 380 lawyers who were working at the division when Trump took office in January, only 140 attorneys or fewer are expected to stay, according to unofficial estimates cited by the Times.
However, Harmeet Dhillon, who was sworn in as the new head of the division on April 7, expressed satisfaction, rather than concern, over losing more than half of her staff.
“Now, over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do, and I think that’s fine,” she said in an interview with conservative commentator Glenn Beck over the weekend.
“We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute” police departments, she added. “The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.”
Under Dhillon and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s leadership, the division has shifted away from its traditional mission of protecting minority and marginalized communities, and toward enforcing Trump’s political agenda.
This includes trying to root out “woke ideology” by aggressively pursuing cases against Ivy League universities and liberal cities, as well as focusing on combatting what the administration sees as antisemitism and anti-Christian bias. The division is also seeking to end “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion programs and is cracking down on the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports, according to The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, the division has abandoned protections for transgender prison inmates, and, after pulling out of major voting rights cases in Georgia and Texas, attorneys were reportedly ordered to dismiss all active cases handled by the division’s voter discrimination unit, The Guardian reported Monday.
“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,” Vanita Gupta, the division’s director under President Barack Obama, told the Times.
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