I Quit the DOJ’s “Crown Jewel” Along With 70 Percent of My Peers. Here’s Why.

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In recent weeks, almost 70 percent of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has resigned. Harmeet Dhillon, the division’s new leader, has publicly claimed that these people left over “policy differences” with the new administration. That is not what happened. Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, the division has undergone an aggressive and illegal purge strategically executed to drain its talent and its power to protect Americans’ most fundamental rights. I know this because, until mid-March, I was an attorney in the Civil Rights Division.

The division’s new leadership under Trump wanted to—to use Vice President J.D. Vance’s description of the administration’s plans for career civil servants—“fire every single [one]” and “replace them with our people.” Despite these warnings, most of my colleagues wanted to stay. They had already served under different administrations—including Trump’s first administration—and knew that priorities would likely shift. But their commitment to nonpartisan enforcement of civil rights laws was real, and they had no intention of abandoning it. And, at least in theory, the law protected them: Federal law prohibits, even criminalizes, firing or transferring civil servants for partisan reasons and tightly regulates layoffs.

This administration got around that problem. Within weeks, key leaders from the Civil Rights Division—along with other parts of the Justice Department the White House planned to destroy, like the Public Integrity Section—were transferred to a nebulous “task force” to pursue dubious legal action against sanctuary cities. A few weeks later, the acting leader of the division, a longtime civil servant and expert in the rights of people with disabilities, was sent there too. The transfers were obviously political and therefore illegal, but the administration didn’t care. And seeing its members not care sent a message: We can do anything. And we will.

In the weeks that followed, the new administration asked career attorneys to advance cases and arguments that were legally unsound, unsupported, and transparently political. It became increasingly clear that staying meant violating our oaths to the Constitution or risking our jobs. Amid this mounting pressure, the administration transferred members of leadership out of the sections they had led, leaving the line attorneys alone to navigate these new demands.

Then the administration made everyone an offer: Quit now, with months of severance, or risk what happens next. Now fully aware that this White House’s goal was to turn civil rights laws against the very people they were meant to protect, hundreds resigned.

As the Civil Rights Division crumbled, so did our work. In March, the administration dropped a lawsuit against migrant shelters, alleging that employees repeatedly sexually abused children. The administration reversed our efforts to advance crucial freedoms like the right to vote and to be free from racial discrimination in hiring and replaced them with new cases loaded with political invective. Thus, for example, the division dropped its lawsuit against SpaceX for discriminatory hiring and opened a reverse-discrimination case against the mayor of Chicago (a Democrat) after he touted the diversity of his administration. Days before the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, the administration announced that it wouldn’t pursue any remedies against police departments (including in Minneapolis) that my colleagues and I found had repeatedly and egregiously violated people’s rights, including by killing them with excessive force. For those of us who had spent countless hours analyzing body-cam footage of police violence against children and people with disabilities, people who whimpered, wet themselves, and begged for their lives, our grief for the unrealized promise of our work will haunt us forever.

The Civil Rights Division was once known as the “crown jewel” of the Justice Department. In the wake of voter suppression, lynchings, and mass violence against Black people, the division was created to protect the most foundational promises in our Constitution—our civil rights, which represent the limits on what a government can do to its people. Those rights are written into the Constitution itself to insulate them from popular will so that no one, no matter how vilified, can be denied America’s most basic guarantees. For almost 70 years, the Civil Rights Division did that fundamental work, regardless of what party was in office.

Our current administration does not believe in limits on what the government can do. It not only destroyed the federal government’s guardian of those rights; it transformed it into the very thing it was created to fight—a weapon of governmental persecution against the disfavored.

What this administration did to the Civil Rights Division is a tragedy. Many of the laws the division enforced—including legislation designed to address patterns of law enforcement misconduct, discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and national origin, and abuses against people with disabilities—cannot be enforced by anyone else; Congress gave that responsibility to the Justice Department alone. People will die, and millions of Americans’ rights will be violated, because the division is not there to defend them.

But how this White House did it—and how it did the same thing to countless other parts of our government that had served the American people for decades—may matter even more. If we have any hope of rebuilding institutions like the Civil Rights Division, it will not be enough to simply install reasonable, law-abiding people when we get the chance. What we need is far more ambitious than that. We have to examine how our civil service protections failed and what could prevent those failures from happening again. And we have to start that work now.

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