The Justice Department’s division tasked with enforcing the nation’s federal civil rights laws has recently seen a mass exodus of “over 100” attorneys, the newly confirmed official leading the division said in an interview this week.
“What we have made very clear last week in memos to each of the 11 sections in the Civil Rights Division is that our priorities under President Trump are going to be somewhat different than they were under President Biden,” DOJ Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in an interview with conservative host Glenn Beck. “And then we tell them, these are the President’s priorities, this is what we will be focusing on — you know, govern yourself accordingly. And en masse, dozens and now over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do.”
The resignations come as Dhillon and Attorney General Pam Bondi have made clear the priorities of the division — which was established in the wake of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s — would shift away from priorities like enforcing voting rights laws and cracking down on unconstitutional policing to culture war issues touted by President Trump in his 2024 campaign.
Harmeet Dhillon, President Donald Trump’s nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, prepares for her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on February 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. A civil liberties lawyer who served vice chair of the California Republican Party, Dhillion lead numerous unsuccessful lawsuits to halt the implementation of stay-at-home orders and other restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
In recent weeks, the department has said it would pursue legal action against states that permit transgender athletes to participate in girls’ and women’s sports, withdrawn from a Biden-era lawsuit against Georgia’s voting laws and convened a task force to investigate incidents of “anti-Christian bias.”
Of the recent resignations, Dhillon said in the interview that she thinks it’s “fine” the attorneys opted to leave.
“We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute, you know, police departments based on statistical evidence or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence,” Dhillon said. “That’s not the job here. The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.”
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) headquarters building in Washington, D.C.
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At the same time, Dhillon said in the interview she was seeking to staff up the division so they could pursue issues like the administration’s actions targeting Harvard University.
“You need more lawyers, investigators and commitment to do the work, and you need the people in the United States identifying these things for us,” Dhillon said. “We’re going to run out of attorneys to work on these things at some point.”
Several top Democrats sent a letter to Bondi, Dhillon and DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz Monday raising concerns over what they described as the “politicization” of the DOJ’s civil rights division.
