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- Changes Set Off Exodus At Civil Rights Division of Justice Department
Changes Set Off Exodus At Civil Rights Division of Justice Department
Lawyers cite less focus on marginalized
Matt Davis
April 29, 2025
Hola, que tal? Como te llamas?
And that’s the extent of my Spanish conversation today. I should go back to Idlewild bookshop for another of their “film and conversation” classes. Although I should really be using Duolingo to learn Italian for our trip there in August, so a triolingo might confuse me. Still: What’s the news? ¿Que hay de nuevo? Quali sono le novità? Eh?
Today’s lead story is by Devlin Barrett, and it’s depressing as hell. Remember, it’s our civic responsibility to be depressed while reading the news for a few minutes each day. That’s all it takes, instead of disengaging. So, here goes:
Hundreds of lawyers and other staff members are leaving the Justice Department’s civil rights division, as veterans of the office say they have been driven out by Trump administration officials who want to drop its traditional work in order to aggressively pursue cases against the Ivy League, other schools and liberal cities.
I mean, if I’d joined the civil rights division I’d quit over this nonsense, too, wouldn’t you?
The evident villain of the piece is Harmeet K. Dhillon, the new head of the department, who sounded like a complete and utter maniac in an interview with Glenn “I’m also a complete and utter maniac” Beck, over the weekend.
“We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute” police departments, she said. “The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.”
That’s right. Harmeet K. Dhillon is a cold-blooded Nazi:
Let’s do something sexist and scrutinize the outfit of a woman in politics, shall we? That red leather jacket is pretty nice, though, eh? Although if I were a stylist I would say it also projects the image of a would-be dictator about to impose horrific changes on a division established to protect the marginalized, and I would be right. If you don’t like this caption, I’d recommend reading to the end about Ms. Dhillon’s history as a commentator and then coming back to me.
Under Ms. Dhillon…
The administration is instead determined, the lawyers said, to fundamentally end how the storied division has functioned since it was established during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s, becoming an enforcement arm for President Trump’s agenda against state and local officials, college administrators and student protesters, among others.
In other words…
“This is not simply a change in enforcement priorities — the division has been turned on its head and is now being used as a weapon against the very communities it was established to protect,” said Vanita Gupta, who ran the division during the Obama administration and served as a senior Justice Department official during the Biden administration.
Meanwhile the agency’s political leaders say their mission is to end the “weaponization” of the department against conservatives, and end “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion inside and outside government.
Ms. Dhillon and Attorney General Pam Bondi have used “caustic language: as they’ve dismissed suits against prison systems over transgender inmates, and voter suppression.
“The prior administration’s arguments in transgender inmate cases were based on junk science,” Ms. Dhillon said.
“Georgians deserve secure elections, not fabricated claims of false voter suppression meant to divide us,” Ms. Bondi said.
The Trump administration hates trans people and it loves voter suppression. When Mr. Trump took office there were 380 lawyers in the civil rights division. It’s estimated there are now 140 or possibly fewer.
I used to work in New Orleans covering law enforcement in the days when the jail system was put under a federal consent decree, supervised by the Federal government’s civil rights division. I can assure you that with fewer attorneys available to supervise such a consent decree, more people would have died in the city’s jail system. What this amounts to is a wholesale admission by the Trump administration that they don’t care about people dying under state government supervision. It’s outlandish and horrific. I remember looking at photographs from the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office showing a man who had killed himself by eating toilet paper and thinking, “I’m tired of this.” But I also remember thinking, “I’m glad there are civil rights attorneys from the government looking into this.”
Now, those folks are going away. And the department they used to work for is being eviscerated:
The concerns of career staff members inside the division are not simply that much of their traditional work is being abandoned. Current and former staff members say Ms. Dhillon and other political appointees in the department have pushed the division to embark on priorities of the Trump administration that do not appear to line up with current anti-discrimination laws or the decades of precedents surrounding those laws.
For instance, a handful of civil rights lawyers have been sent to the Department of Health and Human Services. Their orders are “to investigate antisemitism involving campus protests against Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip.” Those investigations are “meant to focus on medical schools, because the federal government can withhold sizable sums of grant money that goes to them. The Trump administration, these people said, sees the money as a key form of leverage to dictate new standards for campus conduct.”
Civil rights? Not so much.
Another handful of lawyers have been reassigned within the Justice Department to work on issues involving antisemitism on college campuses, a task that also appears to be focused on investigating student protests and how university officials dealt with them, these people said.
Other civil rights lawyers have been assigned to work on cases for the Trump administration’s stated goal of “protecting women at colleges and schools” — which is how the administration describes its efforts to prevent transgender students from playing women’s sports. In the interview with Mr. Beck, Ms. Dhillon suggested that she planned to hire quickly to pursue such cases.
Otherwise, she said, “we’re going to run out of attorneys.”
I mean, sure. I just looked at Ms. Dhillon’s wikipedia page and it’s a doozy.
After finishing high school at age 16, she attended Dartmouth College. She became a writer and eventually editor-in-chief at The Dartmouth Review.[10]
During her tenure at The Review, a satirical column criticizing the school's President and the policies of his administration generated controversy. In the column, Dartmouth College President James O. Freedman, who was Jewish, was likened to Adolf Hitler due to the alleged discriminatory policies of his administration against conservatives. These policies were referred to by the column as a "holocaust" and the "Final Solution to the Conservative Problem". The column also characterized conservatives at Dartmouth as being "deported in cattle cars in the night".[12]
Dhillon claimed that the column sought to draw parallels between so-called "liberal fascism" and fascism. She stated that there was no intention to minimize the horrors of the Holocaust, rather the column sought to demonstrate the mistreatment that conservative students faced under President Freedman's administration.[12]
I’m almost speechless. But I will say that accusing a Jewish person of behaving like Hitler and imposing a “final solution” on Conservatives while you’re at University suggests you’re both an anti-Semite and perhaps more importantly, a sociopath. She is the first Republican woman and first Republican of Indian descent to lead the division. That’s a good thing, but honestly, I feel like she isn’t so much a DEI hire as a DIE hire.
Say, is there a story that might cheer me up a bit?
Oh, sure. Read this story about how the number two seeded Houston Rockets are facing elimination against the seven-seeded Golden State Warriors in the NBA Playoffs — unless, of course, you happen to support the Rockets. In which case I got nothin’ for ya, just like Jalen Green in the second half last night. 🔥
Thanks for letting me read the newspaper so that you don’t have to.
Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.
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