Justice Department’s Reshaped Civil Rights Mission Transforms Its Work and Workforce

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has been fundamentally reshaped under Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who has pushed out hundreds of career attorneys and redirected the unit’s enforcement powers toward President Trump’s political priorities, according to an NPR investigation published Sunday. The changes have altered both the cases the division pursues and the lawyers who carry out its work.

A 70-Year Mission Reconsidered

Created almost 70 years ago during the movement to end racial segregation, the Civil Rights Division historically sought to combat discrimination and protect the constitutional rights of Americans in matters ranging from voting and housing to employment, education and policing. The division’s priorities have shifted from administration to administration, but its core enforcement work had remained consistent across both parties, NPR reported.

Dhillon, a conservative attorney who took over as the division’s chief in April 2025, has argued that the unit’s mission had narrowed over time to protecting only one segment of society. In her view, that produced 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?” she said at a Federalist Society event last November. “That’s the thinking really that underlies a lot of our civil rights enforcement work.”

Shifting Enforcement Priorities

According to NPR, the division has dropped investigations and withdrawn statements of interest in dozens of cases, including those involving voting rights, racial discrimination and civil actions against anti-abortion activists. It has ended investigations into police departments over alleged constitutional violations.

Some of the most aggressive work of Dhillon’s tenure has been on the voting front. The division has sent monitors to state primary elections and filed lawsuits demanding voter information from a slew of states, in furtherance of the administration’s focus on alleged election fraud by noncitizens. State election officials from both parties have accused the Justice Department of overreach, and judges have dismissed more than two dozen of the department’s lawsuits.

The voting push suffered a significant setback on October 9, when U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled that the department’s policy of collecting states’ unredacted voter rolls to check against a federal immigration database was unlawful. Sooknanan found the policy violated privacy laws and risked disenfranchising voters, writing that it “flies in the face of duly enacted laws designed to protect Americans.”

Education has been another active front. In the two months preceding NPR’s report, the division accused law schools at the University of California, Berkeley and Duke University, as well as medical schools at UC San Francisco and George Washington University, of discriminating against white and Asian students in admissions. It also sued UCLA and Harvard for allegedly allowing antisemitism to flourish on campus. In August, a federal judge dismissed the department’s lawsuit against Harvard, finding the claims were “too isolated and episodic” to prove a civil rights violation.

Not every unit has been affected to the same degree. Sections addressing housing and disability rights are still doing much of their traditional work, NPR reported. Last year, for example, the department sued Uber for denying rides to passengers with service dogs or wheelchairs.

A Division Depleted

One of the most consequential changes, according to NPR’s reporting based on four current and former division officials, is to the people who do the work. Dhillon encouraged attorneys and staff who did not want to implement her vision to leave, telling Glenn Beck in an interview last year that “the job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.”

Up to 80% of the division’s staff departed in a wave of departures, much of it during the height of the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency cuts. Since Trump returned to office, some 300 attorneys have left the division, according to current and former officials. The Justice Department says roughly 130 have been hired to replace them, and that there are now more division attorneys hired during the second Trump administration than holdovers from prior administrations.

Current and former officials say the departures have left the division shorthanded and depleted of institutional knowledge.

“There are so few people there doing civil rights work at all,” said Georgetown Law professor Christy Lopez, who worked more than a decade in the division before leaving in 2017.

Dispute Over Hiring

Current and former officials also say Dhillon changed the hiring process, setting aside rules meant to insulate it from partisan political considerations. Those rules were put in place roughly two decades ago after a scandal over political hiring during the George W. Bush administration, when the division lost some 70% of its attorneys and political appointees were accused of barring attorneys from investigating certain cases. In response, career staff were given a leading role in reviewing resumes, conducting interviews and recommending candidates.

A Justice Department spokesperson denied that any changes have been 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, adding that the 130 new attorneys include many who clerked for federal judges.

The NPR report notes that the accounts rest partly on three anonymous sources speaking “out of fear of retribution,” and it documents a direct factual dispute between the department’s official position and the individuals it interviewed. That dispute, along with the Trump administration’s framing of the division’s work as “equal enforcement,” is likely to remain contested.

A Vision Defended

In a statement to NPR, Dhillon defended the division’s record, saying it had “held universities accountable for antisemitic harassment, defended the constitutional rights of Americans of every faith, and protected the integrity of federal elections.”

“Civil rights laws exist to protect individuals from discrimination, and that is exactly how we enforce them,” she said. “Critics calling equal enforcement ‘weaponization’ are telling on themselves.”

What to Watch

The reshaping of the Civil Rights Division arrives with the November 2026 midterm elections approaching, giving the division’s voting-rights work heightened significance. The Sooknanan ruling has temporarily checked one of the administration’s most sweeping voting initiatives, though the Supreme Court has previously set aside one of her decisions.

Former attorney Dena Robinson, who left the division last year and now works at the ACLU, said she could have understood a push to bring in attorneys who would both advance the president’s priorities and continue the division’s traditional enforcement work.

“But that’s just not happening anymore,” she said.