Judges toss more than two dozen DOJ civil rights lawsuits
Harmeet Dhillon, a conservative attorney, took over as chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in April and vowed to radically reshape the unit and its mission. Over the past 18 months, she has pushed out hundreds of longtime attorneys, replaced many of them with inexperienced ideological allies, and used the division’s enforcement powers to pursue President Trump’s agenda, according to four current and former division officials, three of whom spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.
Created almost 70 years ago during the movement to end racial segregation, the division historically has sought to combat discrimination and protect the constitutional rights of all Americans in everything from voting and housing to employment, education and policing. The division’s priorities have shifted from administration to administration, although its core work has remained consistent.
Dhillon, who was born in India and immigrated to the United States as a child, argues that the division’s mission narrowed over the years to protecting the rights of one segment of society: people of color. In her view, that created a form of “benevolent racism” designed to punish “the descendants of those who may have been responsible for the sins of the past.”
“As the logic goes, the white oppressors of years past kept Brown and Black people down, why not give them a taste of their own medicine?” Dhillon said last November at an event for the conservative Federalist Society. “That’s the thinking really that underlies a lot of our civil rights enforcement work.”
Dhillon has said the division’s direction changed in 2025, when President Trump returned to office and she arrived at the Justice Department. Since then, the division has dropped investigations and withdrawn statements of interest in dozens of cases, including matters involving voting rights, racial discrimination and civil actions against anti-abortion activists. It also has ended investigations into police departments over alleged constitutional violations.
Some of the most aggressive work of her tenure has been on the voting front. The division has sent monitors to keep tabs on states’ primary elections and filed lawsuits demanding voter information from a slew of states, in furtherance of Trump’s focus on alleged election fraud by noncitizens. State election officials, Republican and Democratic, have accused the Justice Department of overreach, and judges have tossed more than two dozen of the department’s lawsuits, including most recently in Georgia.
Education is another active front. In the past two months, the division has accused the law schools at the University of California, Berkeley and Duke University, and the medical schools at the University of California, San Francisco and George Washington University, of discriminating against white and Asian students in admissions. It also has sued UCLA and Harvard for allegedly allowing antisemitism to flourish on campus. In August, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit against Harvard, finding the claims of antisemitism were “too isolated and episodic” to prove the school was violating civil rights laws.
In a statement to NPR, Dhillon defended the division’s work under her leadership. “Under this administration, the division has held universities accountable for antisemitic harassment, defended the constitutional rights of Americans of every faith, and protected the integrity of federal elections,” she said. “Civil rights laws exist to protect individuals from discrimination, and that is exactly how we enforce them. Critics calling equal enforcement ‘weaponization’ are telling on themselves.”
Not every section has changed to the same degree, according to three current and former division officials. Units handling housing and disability rights are still doing much of their traditional work — last year the department sued Uber for denying rides to passengers with service dogs or wheelchairs.
Dhillon has also reshaped the division by changing who does the work. Early in her tenure she accused division attorneys of pursuing a left-wing agenda. “The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology,” she told Glenn Beck in an interview last year, and she encouraged attorneys and staff who did not want to implement her vision to leave. Up to 80% of the division’s staff did exactly that, in a wave of departures that has decimated the division’s institutional knowledge, according to current and former officials.
Much of the exodus occurred during the height of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency cuts; current and former officials say many people left or retired early to prevent staff cuts imposed from on high. Since Trump returned to office, some 300 attorneys have left the division, according to current and former officials, and the Justice Department says about 130 have been hired to replace them. There are now more division attorneys hired during the second Trump administration than holdovers from previous administrations, the officials say.
The departures have left the division shorthanded, depleted of talent, expertise and basic manpower, current and former officials say. “There are so few people there doing civil rights work at all,” said Christy Lopez, a Georgetown Law professor who worked in the division for more than a decade before leaving in 2017.
Officials also describe changes to how the division hires. Rules put in place some two decades ago, after a political hiring scandal during the George W. Bush administration in which the division lost some 70% of its attorneys and political appointees were accused of prohibiting attorneys from investigating cases, gave non-political career staff a leading role in hiring: career attorneys would review resumes, conduct interviews and write a memo recommending a candidate, a recommendation that was almost always honored. “Those rules were put in place to prevent politics from dictating who gets a job with the Civil Rights Division rather than merit, rather than their experience and their skills and their commitment to civil rights work,” Lopez said.
Under Dhillon, the front office — made up of political appointees and ideological allies — has taken the lead in hiring and removed career staff from the process, according to current and former officials. A Justice Department spokesperson denied that any changes were made to the hiring process. “Career staff hire career staff, just as in prior administrations. Any claim otherwise is a deliberate misrepresentation driven by political bias,” the spokesperson said. “The result is 130 outstanding new attorneys, many of whom clerked for federal district and appellate judges. We are proud of every one of them, and they are already strengthening the Division’s enforcement work.”
Current and former officials say political ideology appears to be a significant factor in hiring decisions, and some of the new hires previously worked for conservative legal groups including the Pacific Legal Foundation and Only Citizens Vote Coalition. The officials also raise concerns about qualifications, saying most of the new attorneys have little experience, if any, in civil rights work and some have little legal experience at all — a shortfall that has hampered some of the division’s efforts to pursue Trump’s agenda. “I could understand it if Harmeet wanted to bring in people who could both further the president’s priorities and also continue with the division’s enforcement work, its traditional enforcement work,” said Dena Robinson, who left the division last year and now works at the ACLU. “But that’s just not happening anymore.”