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The Trump administration quietly transformed the Justice Department’s civil rights division, expelling a majority of career managers and implementing new priorities: waking up a decades-old mission to enforce laws that prohibit discrimination in employment, housing and voting rights.
More than dozens of senior lawyers (many with decades of experience working under the president of both parties) have been reassigned, current and former officials say. According to sources, they resigned in frustration after being moved to an undesirable role independent of their expertise.
“It turned into full blood,” said a senior Justice Department attorney in the department who is not allowed to speak publicly.
Last week, President Donald Trump’s hand-picked division chief issued a series of memos outlining priorities that are dramatically opposed to how both Republican and Democrat administrations enforce civil rights laws, including the first Trump administration.
Rather than focusing on federal law enforcement against discrimination, the department is now accused of pursuing priorities laid out in a series of Trump executive orders, including “holding men out of women’s sports” and “ends radical indoctrination in K-12 learning.”
Dillon was a conservative cultural warrior who represented Trump, who challenged the results of the 2020 election, and enthusiastically supported his unfounded claims of fraud.
This change has not been published by the DOJ. Reuters first reported some of them on Tuesday.
“This is 180 shifts from the department’s traditional mission,” said a former department official who refused to be named for fear of retaliation.
“These documents appear to have been created in a vacuum of total divorce from reality,” the former official said. “The department can only enforce laws passed by Congress, and these orders appear to be pondering the department’s lawyers who will execute in work that deviates fundamentally from the department’s long-standing mission.”
In a statement, Dillon portrayed the change as a normal exploration of emphasis and efficiency in the new administration.
“Each new administration has its own priorities and allocates resources accordingly,” Dillon said. “The Trump administration is no different. When I assumed my duties as Attorney General, I learned that certain sections of civil rights had quite a few existing caseloads and backlogs, which formed the basis for temporary details that would help me get those sections and stay.”
She added: “The Civil Rights Division looks forward to continuing to actively protect American civil rights.”
NBC News spoke about the 10 current and former employees in the civil rights sector in this article, as well as other sources familiar with the Department of Justice’s business. Most refused to be identified, citing the fear of retaliation.
Sources say many of the department’s section chiefs have been moved to roles that are unrelated to legal background, such as the offices that deal with complaints arbitration and offices that handle public records requests.
The Civil Rights Division overhaul is a microcosm of what’s going on across the federal government as the Trump administration eliminated nonpartisan civil servants and dismantled or relocated federal agencies with speed and boldness. According to current and former staff, there have been few similar changes in other Department of Justice offices. But they say the degree of reuse in the civil rights sector stands out.
Established in 1957 after the passage of major civil rights laws in the early 20th century, the Civil Rights Division has always been the subject of the president’s policy preferences, and enforcement priorities tend to differ between Republican and Democratic administrations. However, there is no precedent for changes made in the past three months. This is far more important than what happened during Trump’s first term, current and former officials say.
“I’ve been there for nearly 18 years and what’s going on is basically the opposite of what we were doing,” said the veteran lawyer who recently left the department. “In the first Trump administration, they got engaged to us as lawyers. The political appointees were regular lawyers. Sometimes we persuaded them, sometimes against them, but there was always a conversation about why the law needed and what it needed. That’s not happening.”
In the Biden administration, the Civil Rights Division has convicted 180 police officers of violating people’s civil rights, according to Justice Department records. He also charged a variety of famous hate crime cases, including those against a Texas man who targeted Mexicans when he killed 23 people at Walmart in El Paso, and a Pennsylvania man who killed 11 congregations on a tree at a life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Amidst many settlements over racism, the department secured reforms at Hawkins County Schools in Tennessee. There, the investigation created a racist and hostile environment, including a mock “slave auction” to sell black students to white counterparts and a “Monkey of the Monkey” campaign against black students. Regarding voting rights, the department successfully challenged Arizona’s law, asking those who register to list the birth class and vote to provide evidence of citizenship.
Current and former employees say many of these enforcement actions are unthinkable under the new administration.
“They’ve retracted everything we did and took the other side, for example, on voting rights,” said a civil department lawyer who recently departed. “This isn’t like, ‘Oh, I want to do more religious examples’ or ‘I don’t want to do creative redline cases’. This abandons everything we have done in the past.
Dillon took office on April 7th, but changes were already underway. So far, the Civil Rights Division has suspended investigations into police abuse and has launched an investigation into whether Los Angeles violates people’s gun rights and whether American universities tolerate anti-Semitism. The department also took part in a lawsuit last week that accused Maine of violating the law by allowing trans athletes to participate in women’s sports teams.
At the same time, all traditional work in the department has been suspended as the management jobs managed in recent weeks have not been met, according to current and former officials.
“If normal Americans think this administration is trying to protect their rights, they’re just wrong,” said the department lawyer who recently departed.
In their Project 2025 Blueprint, conservative Trump supporters wrote that Trump should “reorganize the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and make him act as a vanguard” for what he called “returning to legality.”
“U.S. private and public sector entities have been surrounded in recent years by special interests, government extremists, and unclean alliances on the far left,” they write. “This unholy alliance speaks of praise for advancing the interests of certain segments of American society, but its progress is at the expense of other Americans, and in almost every case it violates years of federal law.”
Dillon’s memo, published last week, laid out an extensive set of new priorities.
For example, the Federal Government Coordination and Compliance Section was appointed by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prevent and relieve discrimination based on race, color, origin, gender, religion and shared ancestors in federal funding programs nationwide.
Dhillon’s memo says that this section currently does not mention in the 1964 law but has new priorities outlined in Trump’s executive orders, such as “advocating for women from gender ideological extremism,” “recovering merit-based opportunities,” and “designating English as the official language of the United States.”
On Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondy held a new Trump Administration Task Force meeting on “Eliminating Anti-Christian Bias.”
“The Biden administration engaged in a terrible pattern of targeting peaceful Christians while ignoring violent, anti-Christian crime,” she said.
Bondi served as Florida Attorney General from 2011 to 2019 after she was the first woman to be elected to the office.
This story first appeared on nbcnews.com. More from NBC News:
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