President Donald Trump has entrusted Harmeet Dhillon to enforce his culture agenda, a mission that involves reorienting the Department of Justice’s historic civil rights office and losing a majority of its workforce.
Dhillon’s sharp pivot toward curbing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and combating antisemitism and anti-Christian sentiments is driving what reports say will amount to a loss of around 70% of the Civil Rights Division’s roughly 340 employees.
But Dhillon, a conservative attorney who has long focused on civil liberties, told the Washington Examiner she is unfazed by the exodus, which has largely involved employees accepting buyout offers to resign.
“Many lawyers have expressed an interest in coming to work with us, and I am confident that we will be able to accomplish our goals,” Dhillon said. “We have the full support of the Attorney General’s leadership team and the White House, and more importantly, the American people.”
She attributed the resignations to people who “decided they would rather leave than carry out this administration’s priorities under the civil rights umbrella.” She said some refused to help with the division’s antisemitism work, which is a top priority for her.
Ahead of Dhillon’s Senate confirmation, the Civil Rights Division established an antisemitism task force designed to combat harassment of Jewish people.
The formation of the panel aligned with Trump’s directives at the start of his presidency to use the full force of the executive branch, including the DOJ, to root out “pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation.” Trump cited Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel in 2023 and his broader alliance with the country as it continues its deadly war with Hamas in Gaza.
The Civil Rights Division has since announced visits to 10 college campuses where it said harassment of Jewish students has occurred. Elite university campuses became fraught with pro-Palestine protests involving encampments and takeovers of academic buildings in response to the Middle East conflict.
Trump, who has used his authority to attempt to effect change at colleges, was hit with lawsuits after he froze billions of dollars in funding to Harvard and Columbia universities, in part because of their perceived passivity toward antisemitic behavior on campus. The move raised alarm among free speech advocates, who accused the administration of unconstitutionally jawboning the schools.
The DOJ has also defended court cases involving federal authorities arresting noncitizen students and green card holders who have displayed varying degrees of activism in favor of Palestinians. In a more controversial case that did not involve allegations of criminal behavior, that of Mahmoud Khalil, the Trump administration has indicated that his speech violated immigration law because it was at odds with national interests. The case remains pending.
Since it was established in the 1950s, the Civil Rights Division’s top focus has been to promote equality and enforce anti-discrimination laws. During the Biden administration, the division took a traditional approach by entering into numerous consent decrees with police departments that allegedly engaged in excessive force practices and pursued Voting Rights Act violations, which prosecutors said caused voter suppression of racial minorities.
Nicknamed the “crown jewel” of the DOJ, the Civil Rights Division has been “tarnished,” former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade wrote in an op-ed on Wednesday. McQuade wrote that under Trump and Dhillon, the division has been recast “to attack the very interests it once protected” and its “current transformation is unlike anything we have ever seen.”
Since Trump took office, the DOJ has withdrawn election-related lawsuits in Georgia, Virginia, and Alabama. Dhillon, a key defender of some of Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020, told the Washington Examiner she plans to “make sure federal election laws are fully enforced and defended” and that she does not intend to stray from enforcing key statutes that fall under the Civil Rights Division’s purview.
“All of our work at the Civil Rights Division involves enforcing the Civil Rights laws, and since I started, we have had a continuous stream of traditional civil rights work start or continue,” Dhillon said. “That will not change. The Americans With Disabilities Act, Title VII, employment and housing discrimination, and more — these are all important priorities of the DOJ.”
Senate Democrats raised alarm in a letter to Dhillon about what they said were nonpublic memos she sent to at least five Civil Rights Division sections that change “long-standing Division enforcement objectives,” including by focusing on allegations of voter fraud. The Democrats also said they were concerned that no career officials were left in leadership positions there.
Another memo “evidently directs investigations of educational institutions to focus on racial discrimination against white applicants,” the Democrats wrote.
Dhillon said she is passionate about eliminating racial preferences in admissions and hiring processes. Any investigative or prosecutorial efforts on this front would flow from Trump’s string of executive orders seeking to rid schools of what he has described as “illegal DEI.”
The Civil Rights Division has also made efforts to carry out Trump’s executive orders on “gender ideology extremism.” On Friday, the office announced that the DOJ intervened in two cases against the Georgia Department of Corrections involving transgender inmates.
One involved an inmate named Ronnie Fuller, a biological woman who identifies as a man, alleging that the state unlawfully refused to pay for Fuller’s gender dysphoria treatment, which included a mastectomy. In the other case, a “Jane Doe” inmate argued “two castration attempts, multiple suicide attempts, and almost daily self-harm” were a result of the state refusing to pay for surgery to treat gender dysphoria.
Dhillon is less than one month into the role and is mapping out her priorities and “how best to implement them,” she said.
Religious freedom, another area under the Civil Rights Division’s jurisdiction, is on her radar. She is participating in Trump’s anti-Christian bias task force and said she plans to use the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act to “protect people of faith and women seeking medical treatment or counseling from violence and interference.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizzelle, directed the department in January to cease all “abortion-related [Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act]” prosecutions except in extreme circumstances. Bondi herself told Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) during her confirmation hearing that she planned to enforce the law equally among both anti-abortion activists and those advocating abortion access.
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Under former President Joe Biden, the DOJ brought charges against dozens of mostly anti-abortion defendants and was criticized for being overzealous in certain cases, such as those involving elderly women or in the case of Catholic father Mark Houck, who was unanimously acquitted by a jury of FACE Act charges.
The first Trump administration’s DOJ brought five single-defendant criminal cases under the FACE Act, according to federal data.