Rather than execute the Trump administration’s oppressive plans to weaponize the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division against political enemies, dozens of DOJ attorneys have chosen to walk off the job instead.
When MAGA lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, a key figure in Donald Trump’s bogus attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss, was nominated to lead the DOJ’s civil rights efforts, it seemed clear the division was poised to abandon — if not outright attack — the rights it has historically stood to protect.
Dhillon is well on her way to achieving that, having dropped several voting rights cases meant to combat racial discrimination in elections; backed away from its pay discrimination lawsuit against the Mississippi State Senate; and terminated an environmental justice settlement that the DOJ reached with Lowndes County, Alabama. She has also directed her staff to prioritize cases involving purported voter fraud, trans women’s participation in sports and Trump’s insistence that English be the official language of the U.S. — steps The New York Times described as Dhillon using her department to push Trump’s “culture war agenda.”
Now, the Times is reporting that “hundreds” of DOJ employees aren’t sticking around to be pawns in Trump’s political game:
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.
The Times added:
The wave of departures has only accelerated in recent days, as the administration reopened its “deferred resignation program,” which would allow employees to resign but continue to be paid for a period of time. The offer, for those who work in the division, expires on Monday. More than 100 lawyers are expected to take it, on top of a raft of earlier departures, in what would amount to a decimation of the ranks of a crucial part of the Justice Department.
For her part, Dhillon has tried to downplay the worrisome message being sent by the staff exodus. In a recent interview with right-wing commentator Glenn Beck, she said: “En masse, dozens and now over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do.” And in a recent interview with the conservative outlet The Daily Caller, Dhillon said “there’ll be quite a bit of turnover here” — and added her demonstrably false claim that the division will continue its “traditional, core functions,” while also pursuing “new functions that our president wants us to be looking at and new functions that I want to do.” For her part, Dhillon has tried to downplay the worrisome message being sent by the staff exodus. As examples of new priorities, she mentioned lawsuits around Second Amendment violations, “rampant antisemitism on college campuses” and employers that “discriminate against people on the basis of race and use quotas in hiring that are in no way justified.” “That’s almost every employer in America, unfortunately,” Dhillon wildly claimed. “Certainly in the public sector.” There’s, of course, no evidence that American companies are deploying racial quotas en masse. But that claim just shows Dhillon appears to be taking cues from the MAGA id in her decision-making rather than adhering to any sane reading of American civil rights law.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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