When Harmeet Dhillon took over as chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in April 2025, she vowed to fundamentally reshape both its mission and its workforce.
Over the past 18 months, Dhillon has pushed out hundreds of longtime attorneys and replaced many of them with inexperienced ideological allies, according to four current and former division officials.
The Civil Rights Division was created nearly 70 years ago during the movement to end racial segregation, and has historically worked to combat discrimination across voting, housing, employment, education and policing.
Dhillon argues that the division’s mission has narrowed over the years to protect only people of color, creating what she describes as a form of “benevolent racism” aimed at punishing descendants of those tied to historical wrongs.
“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.
Since Dhillon’s arrival, the division has dropped investigations and withdrawn statements of interest in dozens of cases involving voting rights, racial discrimination and civil actions against anti-abortion activists.
On the voting front, the division has filed lawsuits demanding voter information from multiple states, pursuing Trump’s focus on alleged election fraud by noncitizens, though judges have dismissed more than two dozen of those lawsuits.
The division has also 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.
A federal judge dismissed the department’s lawsuit against Harvard University in August, finding that claims of antisemitism were “too isolated and episodic” to prove the school was violating civil rights laws.
In a statement, Dhillon defended her record, saying 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.”
“Civil rights laws exist to protect individuals from discrimination, and that is exactly how we enforce them,” she added. “Critics calling equal enforcement ‘weaponization’ are telling on themselves.”
One of the most significant changes has been to personnel, with up to 80% of division staff departing in a wave that current and former officials say has decimated the unit’s institutional knowledge.
Some 300 attorneys have left the division since Trump returned to office, according to current and former officials, while the Justice Department says approximately 130 have been hired to replace them.
Georgetown Law professor Christy Lopez, who worked in the division for more than a decade before leaving in 2017, said, “There are so few people there doing civil rights work at all.”
Current and former officials say Dhillon has also altered the hiring process, sidelining rules introduced two decades ago after a political hiring scandal during the George W. Bush administration that saw the division lose some 70% of its attorneys.
Those rules gave non-political career staff a leading role in hiring, but under Dhillon the front office, staffed by political appointees, has taken control of the process, according to current and former officials.
A Justice Department spokesperson denied any changes to the hiring process, stating, “Career staff hire career staff, just as in prior administrations. Any claim otherwise is a deliberate misrepresentation driven by political bias.”
Lopez warned of the consequences, saying, “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.”
Current and former officials say many new hires lack meaningful civil rights experience and some have little legal experience at all, which has hampered the division’s ability to pursue its stated agenda.
Dena Robinson, who left the division last year and now works at the ACLU, said, “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. But that’s just not happening anymore.”
