Justice Dept Civil Rights Unit Reshaped Under Dhillon

In roughly 18 months at the helm of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has pushed out hundreds of longtime attorneys, replaced many of them with less experienced ideological allies, and redirected the storied unit’s enforcement powers toward President Trump’s agenda, according to NPR.

The transformation marks a sharp break from the division’s nearly 70-year mission of combating discrimination and protecting the constitutional rights of Americans in voting, housing, employment, education and policing. The changes carry particular weight ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, given the division’s traditional role in safeguarding ballot access.

A 180-Degree Turn

Created roughly seven decades ago during the movement to end racial segregation, the Civil Rights Division has long been considered the “crown jewel” of the Justice Department. Its priorities have shifted from administration to administration, but its core work remained consistent — until now.

Since taking office in April 2025, Dhillon has dropped investigations and withdrawn statements of interest in dozens of cases, including those involving voting rights, racial discrimination and civil actions against anti-abortion activists.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, as NPR reported in May 2025.

Dhillon has been explicit about her intentions. At a Federalist Society event, she described the division’s work under Democratic administrations as a speeding train that Republican administrations merely tried to slow.

“There really hasn’t been a focus on turning the train around and driving it in the opposite direction. And that’s my vision of the DOJ civil rights [division],” she said. “We don’t just slow down the woke. We take up the cause to achieve the executive branch’s goals.”

According to NPR, Dhillon argues the division’s mission had narrowed to protecting the rights of just one segment of society — people of color — creating what she calls a form of “benevolent racism.”

Voting and Education Fronts

Some of the division’s most aggressive work under Dhillon has come on the voting front. It has sent monitors to state primary elections and filed lawsuits demanding voter information from a slew of states, pursuing Trump’s focus on alleged election fraud by noncitizens.

State election officials from both parties have pushed back, accusing the department of overreach. Judges have tossed more than two dozen of the department’s lawsuits, most recently in Georgia, according to NPR.

On education, the division has accused law schools at the University of California, Berkeley and Duke University, along with medical schools at the University of California, San Francisco and George Washington University, of discriminating against white and Asian students in admissions. It sued UCLA and Harvard for allegedly allowing antisemitism to flourish on campus.

In August 2026, a federal judge dismissed the department’s lawsuit against Harvard, finding the antisemitism claims were “too isolated and episodic” to prove a persistent civil rights violation, NPR reported.

“We disagree with the ruling and are assessing next steps,” Dhillon said at the time.

Not every unit has been affected equally. Sections handling housing and disability rights are still largely doing traditional work. Last year, for example, the department sued Uber for denying rides to passengers with service dogs or wheelchairs.

Exodus and Hiring Changes

One of the most consequential changes has been to the division’s workforce. Early in her tenure, Dhillon accused division attorneys of pursuing a left-wing agenda and encouraged those who disagreed with her vision to leave.

“The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology,” she told Glenn Beck in a 2025 interview.

Up to 80% of division staff departed in a wave of resignations that has decimated the unit’s institutional knowledge. Some 300 attorneys have left since Trump returned to office, according to current and former officials, while 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.

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

Current and former officials also say Dhillon has changed the hiring process, shrugging off rules meant to insulate it from partisan politics. Those rules were put in place roughly two decades ago after a scandal over political hiring during the George W. Bush administration. A Justice Department spokesperson denied any changes, calling such claims “a deliberate misrepresentation driven by political bias.”

Alarms From Critics and Observers

Former officials and legal scholars have sounded alarms about the division’s direction. Kristen Clarke, Dhillon’s predecessor under the Biden administration, told The Guardian that the division is now “nothing more than a shadow of its former self.”

“The division has abandoned its mission to fight hate crimes, human trafficking, law enforcement misconduct, voter suppression, redlining and much more,” Clarke said. “This division has left millions of Americans vulnerable to predatory attacks and discrimination.”

Stacey Young, a former division attorney who now runs the group Justice Connection, told NPR that the unit’s proper role is to enforce laws protecting all Americans — not to serve the White House.

“It’s not an arm of the White House. It doesn’t exist to enact the president’s own agenda,” Young said. “That’s a perversion of the separation of powers and the role of an independent Justice Department.”

Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago Law School professor, framed the shift in starker terms, describing what he sees as the use of a division built to protect the vulnerable to wage “an all-out assault on the civil rights of vulnerable people.”

The division has also been beset by what observers describe as sloppy lawyering — errors in voter-roll lawsuits, incorrect addresses emailed for months, and a letter on Texas redistricting that even Texas officials called “unsound” and “a mess.”

What’s Next

Dhillon has defended her record and rejected the “weaponization” framing.

“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 told NPR. “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.”

With the 2026 midterms approaching, the division’s weakened enforcement posture — and its aggressive voter-information litigation — will face close scrutiny. Whether courts continue to reject its voting-related suits, and how the workforce changes affect future cases, remain open questions. What is clear is that the Civil Rights Division is no longer the institution it was for most of its history.