Trump upends DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sparking ‘bloodbath’ in senior ranks

The Trump administration has quietly transformed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, forcing out a majority of career managers and implementing new priorities that current and former officials say abandon a decadeslong mission of enforcing laws that prohibit discrimination in hiring, housing and voting rights.

More than a dozen senior lawyers — many with decades of experience working under presidents of both parties — have been reassigned, the current and former officials say. Some have resigned in frustration after they were moved to less desirable roles unrelated to their expertise, according to the sources.

“It’s been a complete bloodbath,” said a senior Justice Department lawyer in the division who is not authorized to speak publicly.

Last week, President Donald Trump’s hand-picked head of the division issued a series of memos outlining priorities that are dramatically at odds with the way both Republican and Democratic administrations have enforced civil rights law — including the first Trump administration.

Rather than focusing on enforcing federal laws against discrimination, the division is now charged with pursuing priorities laid out in a series of Trump’s executive orders, including “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports” and “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” according to the memos, which were issued by division head Harmeet Dhillon and obtained by NBC News. 

Dhillon is a conservative culture warrior who represented Trump in challenging the results of the 2020 election and ardently backed his baseless claims of fraud.

The changes have not been publicly announced by the DOJ. Reuters first reported some of them Tuesday.

“This is a 180 shift from the division’s traditional mission,” said a former senior official in the division who declined to be named in fear of retaliation.

“These documents appear to have been created in a vacuum completely divorced from reality,” the former official said. “The division can only enforce statutes that have been passed by Congress, and these orders seem to contemplate division attorneys’ executing on work that fundamentally departs from the division’s long-standing mission.”

In a statement, Dhillon portrayed the changes as a normal shift of emphasis in a new administration, as well as a quest for efficiency.

“Each new administration has its own priorities, and allocates resources accordingly,” Dhillon said. “The Trump administration is no different. When I assumed my duties as Assistant Attorney General, I learned that certain sections in Civil Rights had substantial existing caseloads and backlogs, and that formed the basis of temporary details to assist those sections in getting, and staying, caught up.”

She added: “The Civil Rights Division looks forward to continuing to aggressively protecting the civil rights of Americans.”

NBC News spoke to 10 current and former employees of the Civil Rights Division for this article, as well as other sources familiar with the Justice Department’s operations. Most declined to be identified, citing fear of retaliation.

The sources say many of the division’s section chiefs have been transferred to roles unrelated to their legal backgrounds, including in the complaint adjudication office and the office that handles public records requests.

The overhaul of the Civil Rights Division is a microcosm of what has been happening across the federal government, as the Trump administration has removed nonpartisan civil servants and dismantled or reoriented federal agencies with a speed and an audacity that few thought was possible. Similar changes have been happening to a lesser degree at other Justice Department offices, current and former officials say. But they say the extent of the repurposing of the Civil Rights Division stands out.

Founded in 1957 after the passage of the 20th century’s first major civil rights legislation, the Civil Rights Division has always been subject to the policy preferences of the president, and enforcement priorities tend to differ in Republican and Democratic administrations. But there is no precedent for the changes that have been made over the last three months, which are far more consequential than anything that occurred in Trump’s first term, current and former officials say.

“I was there almost 18 years, and what’s happening now is basically the opposite of what we’ve been doing,” said a veteran lawyer who recently left the department. “In the first Trump administration, they engaged with us as attorneys. The political appointees were normal lawyers. Sometimes we persuaded them and sometimes they disagreed, but there was always a conversation about why and what the law required. That is not happening.”

In the Biden administration, the Civil Rights Division convicted 180 police officers of violating people’s civil rights, according to Justice Department records. It also prosecuted a variety of high-profile hate crimes cases, including one against the Texas man who targeted Mexicans when he killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso and the Pennsylvania man who killed 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Among the many settlements over racial discrimination, the division secured reforms at Hawkins County Schools in Tennessee, where an investigation found that incidents of harassment — including a mock “slave auction” to sell Black students to their white counterparts and a “monkey of the month” campaign to ridicule Black students — created a racially hostile environment. On voting rights, the division successfully challenged an Arizona law requiring people registering to vote to list their birthplaces and provide proof of citizenship.

Current and former employees say many of those enforcement actions are unimaginable under the new regime.

“They are withdrawing everything we’ve done and taking the opposite side on voting rights, for example,” said a recently departed Civil Division lawyer. “This is not ‘Oh, we want to do more religion cases’ or ‘We don’t want to do creative redlining cases.’ This is abandoning everything that we have done in the past. They are actively anti-civil rights. This didn’t happen in Trump 1.”

Dhillon took office April 7, but the changes had already been underway. So far the Civil Rights Division has suspended investigations of police abuse and launched probes into whether Los Angeles is violating people’s gun rights and whether American universities are tolerating antisemitism. The division was also involved in the lawsuit filed last week accusing the state of Maine of violating the law by allowing transgender athletes to participate on women’s sports teams.

At the same time, current and former officials say, the managerial jobs vacated in recent weeks have not been filled, so the traditional work of the division has all but stopped.

“If regular Americans think that this administration is going to protect their rights, they’re just wrong,” a recently departed division lawyer said.

In their Project 2025 blueprint, conservative Trump backers wrote that Trump should “reorganize and refocus the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to serve as the vanguard” for what they called a “return to lawfulness.” 

“Entities across the private and public sectors in the United States have been besieged in recent years by an unholy alliance of special interests, radicals in government, and the far Left,” they wrote. “This unholy alliance speaks in platitudes about advancing the interests of certain segments of American society, but that advancement comes at the expense of other Americans and in nearly all cases violates long-standing federal law.”

Dhillon’s memos, issued last week, laid out a sweeping set of new priorities.

The Federal Coordination and Compliance Section, for example, had been tasked with enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by preventing and remedying discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, religion and shared ancestry in federally funded programs across the country.

Dhillon’s memo says the section now has new priorities, not mentioned in the 1964 law but outlined in Trump’s executive orders, including those on “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism,” “Restoring Merit Based Opportunity” and “Designating English as the Official Language of the United States.”

On Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi hosted a meeting of a new Trump administration task force on “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.”

“The Biden administration engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses,” she said.