Donald Trump’s administration has decimated the “crown jewel” of the Department of Justice.
Dozens of career officials working in the department’s storied civil rights division have left in a mass exodus of prosecutors and staff.
Trump’s new chief of the storied division, Harmeet Dhillon, has recast the agency’s mission into one that leans into the president’s grievances and shifts its focus away from critical missions like police oversight, voting rights protections and combating racial discrimination.
The president has also signed an executive order that directs federal agencies to abandon a critical tool used to enforce the landmark Civil Rights Act, the bedrock civil rights law that forms the basis of the nation’s antidiscrimination laws — from ending segregation to federal protections for housing and employment.
In an expansive executive order signed last month, Trump directed the federal government to “deprioritize” enforcement of federal law that includes “disparate impact liability” — the idea that a policy or behavior that hurts a protected group more than others can be considered discriminatory even if they were not intended to discriminate.
Trump’s executive order on April 23 claims that doing so is unlawful, and ordered agencies to end or revisit pending investigations, lawsuits or judgements that relied on disparate impact liability.
Civil rights groups argue that the disparate impact test is one of the most important tools for uncovering discrimination where seemingly neutral policies or laws have potentially severely different outcomes for protected people.
“If not for disparate impact liability, employers could lawfully deny jobs to applicants of color based on any prior arrests, pay women less without regard to their job duties, and fire older workers based on age limitations, without having to show any business justification for these discriminatory policies,” according to Katy Youker, director of the Economic Justice Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
“The president’s executive orders do not change the law upholding disparate impact as a form of discrimination, but they do expose a vision for America that predates the Civil Rights movement,” she said in a statement.
Dhillon, meanwhile, has redirected the Civil Rights Division staff to investigate allegations of antisemitism as defined under the Trump administration, the participation of transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports, “anti-Christian bias,” and institutions with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
In an interview with conservative commentator Glenn Beck last month, Dhillon said “dozens and now over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do” and have left her division.
“I think that’s fine, because we don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute, you know, police departments based on statistical evidence or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence,” she said. “That’s not the job here. The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.”
The dramatic departure of dozens of career attorneys inside the division “is just further evidence that this is not an administration that cares about civil rights,” said Jin Hee Lee, director of strategic initiatives at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
The rapid transformation of the department is “really unprecedented and and really threatens the foundations of our multiracial democracy, and it’s something that all Americans should be very, very alarmed about,” she told The Independent.
“This is a real moment in history in terms of trying to thwart efforts to undermine our democracy,” she said.
The Trump administration’s crusade against so-called “woke” ideology is a direct assault on civil rights progress, according to civil rights groups and advocates. Dhillon has even suggested that the depth of discrimination in the United States that inspired the civil rights movement and creation of the Civil Rights Act in the first place no longer exists.
“It’s 2025, today,” she said. “The idea that some police department or some big employer can be sued because of statistics, which can be manipulated, is ludicrous and it is unfair.”
The Trump administration is not merely shifting priorities for enforcement of civil rights abuses, Vanita Gupta, who ran the Civil Rights Division during the Obama and Biden administrations, told The New York Times.
“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.
Jon Greenbaum, a former senior trial attorney for the voting rights section at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, called Trump’s gutting of the agency and the departure of career officials “the end” of the division itself.
“This is what we are faced with for the next three and three-quarter years in the Civil Rights Division and the executive branch as a whole,” he wrote last month. “Federal agencies that follow the dictates of one person and his friends while largely ignoring their Congressionally mandated responsibilities.”
