EXCLUSIVE — The Justice Department‘s Civil Rights Division is undergoing a complete internal transformation under President Donald Trump’s second term — not just of enforcement strategy but of personnel, institutional practices, and long-held assumptions about how federal civil rights laws should be applied.
“When my memos went out, that culture changed,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the division, told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview. “There’s literally been lawyers there who spent their entire careers — over 40 years — doing the same thing, no matter who the president is.”
More than half of the division’s attorneys left during the first quarter of this year, Dhillon said, clearing the way to rebuild the division from the ground up on the promise of sweeping changes under Trump. New hiring of career lawyers and political appointees is underway to align the department’s civil rights enforcement with what Dhillon elucidated as the plain text of the law and the trajectory set by the Supreme Court.
Dhillon explained to the Washington Examiner that many of the attorneys who left had worked under previous Democratic administrations and were not receptive to Trump’s directives.
“People are very upset with that — a lot of the career staff,” Dhillon said. “We’re talking [former Presidents Joe] Biden era, [Barack] Obama era, [Bill] Clinton era, Jimmy Carter era, and probably even a few before that — Lyndon B. Johnson era, even — there may have been some lurking around.”
She said she delivered clear guidance to the division’s more than 400 attorneys and support staff within weeks of taking office about new enforcement priorities aligned with Trump administration directives.
“We all know what the laws are, but within those laws, prosecutors and government lawyers have discretion as to their goals and their priorities,” Dhillon said. “Since we’re an executive branch agency, our priorities are the president’s priorities.”
Enforcing new precedent after affirmative action’s fall
The legal trajectory that has paved the way for changes at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division traces back to the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which struck down race-based affirmative action policies in higher education. Dhillon said the decision has had sweeping implications for how the federal government oversees civil rights compliance across education, employment, and federal contracting.
That decision “made clear it is illegal to discriminate against anybody, not just minorities, in hiring,” she said. “We’re just enforcing the law.”
Her office is investigating the University of California system’s “UC 2030 Capacity Plan,” which includes diversity-based faculty recruitment goals. While her division has not made any final determinations about UC, she suggested that other institutions may soon face scrutiny.
“Just about every one of the 6,000 institutions of higher education that receives federal funds is probably out of compliance,” she said. Some have responded cooperatively. Others, such as Harvard, remain “recalcitrant” and are suing the United States, she said. However, Trump told pool reporters Friday that the administration was close to settling with the college but declined to comment on specifics.
DOJ walks away from Black Lives Matter-era consent decrees
The shift in the division’s posture isn’t limited to universities. In late May, Dhillon’s office announced it was pulling out of proposed consent decrees with police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville — two cities that had been under federal investigation following the high-profile police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, which led to a summer of riots and unrest in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
Those consent decrees, initiated during the Biden administration, were intended to impose federal oversight over local law enforcement, including mandatory reforms to training, discipline, and officer recruitment. But Dhillon said the department reviewed the facts and found that the agreements lacked sufficient legal justification to proceed.
“These were based on cherry-picked statistics and flawed legal theories,” she said. “In all the decades of doing consent decrees, the DOJ never actually won one of these cases at trial. They were imposed through pressure, not litigation.”
The division also moved to end investigations into police departments in Phoenix, Memphis, and Oklahoma City, calling the Biden-era proposals a form of “federal micromanagement” that would cost local governments hundreds of millions of dollars without meeting the burden of proof required under federal law.
Dhillon said the federal government’s focus in past consent decree cases had ignored the interests of average citizens, especially in liberal bastions such as Seattle, where anarchists formed an autonomous zone during the 2020 riots. “Who’s getting cut out in that equation? All the taxpayers, all the normal people living in those cities,” she said. “That culture may change when people begin to realize we didn’t have to be under that consent decree — [that] our leadership sold us out.”
Making the shift permanent — with help from the courts
Asked how she plans to ensure the administration’s changes stick beyond 2028, Dhillon pointed to the courts, not political messaging, as the stabilizing force.
It’s not just “according to me,” she said. It’s “according to the Supreme Court.”
She cited the high court’s recent decision in the United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld Tennessee’s ban on transgender procedures for minors under rational basis review.
“There’s a rational basis for protecting children from irreversible harm,” she said. “That’s the standard now.”
Despite the limited holding in Skrmetti, which applies mainly to states seeking to fortify laws protecting children from gender alteration procedures, she also suggested the decision’s reasoning could likely influence other areas of law.
“So, can people claim that they’re entitled to special treatment or a heightened level of scrutiny because they identify themselves as trans? I think the Supreme Court has answered that in at least one context, and I think that context is going to be easily translatable into other areas.”
Meanwhile, Dhillon vowed to course correct on a separate issue of law that many religious and anti-abortion conservatives accused of weaponization under the Biden administration — using the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act on peaceful protesters.
Trump himself chose to pardon 23 people convicted of violating the FACE Act, a law that has come under intense scrutiny from the Right due to allegations of its uneven application against anti-abortion advocates’ First Amendment protections to protest outside clinics.
Still, Dhillon contended that FACE Act prosecutions have occurred — even under Biden — against perpetrators who attack faith-based pregnancy centers, underscoring that an important pillar going forward is that the FACE Act can and should be utilized against “houses of worship.”
“It’s an important law as well, and so we aren’t going to be criminalizing speech that doesn’t rise to the level of interference. OK, so that’s my promise,” she said, adding, “There is a cultural shift that has to happen outside the building, but inside the building, we’re not going to be abusing those laws now.”
Sports cases next up at the Supreme Court
One day after Dhillon’s interview, the Supreme Court announced it would hear two more cases that could define the next chapter in civil rights law: Little v. Hecox and B.P.J. v. West Virginia State Board of Education, both of which ask whether state laws banning biological male athletes in female sports violate the Constitution or Title IX.
“That’s an issue that’s part of our role in Title IX,” Dhillon said. “Several of these schools that you’re going to see on the wrong side of the ‘v’ in a lawsuit from the United States, they had that opportunity, and they fumbled the ball.”
The eventual rulings in the girls’ sports cases next term could clarify whether gender identity is covered under federal education law, a key question for DOJ oversight.
‘FORK IN THE ROAD’: HARMEET DHILLON CALLS ON CONSERVATIVE LAWYERS TO TAKE ON MORE CIVIL RIGHTS CASES
Not only is the Supreme Court working quickly to resolve these thorny culture war battles, but Dhillon’s team has also moved quickly in the short three months she has been at one of the peak mantles for what she’s described as the “largest law firm in the United States.”
“For the DOJ, what we do is we follow the law and where the law takes us,” she added.