When Harmeet Dhillon took over as the new chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division last April, the conservative attorney vowed to radically reshape the storied unit and its mission.
Over the past 18 months, Dhillon has moved aggressively to make that goal a reality. She has pushed out hundreds of longtime attorneys, replaced many of them with inexperienced ideological allies, and used the division's enforcement powers to pursue President Trump's MAGA agenda, according to four current and former division officials.
Three of the individuals spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.
At the root of these changes is Dhillon's vision of the Civil Rights Division and its mission that dramatically departs from tradition.
Created almost 70 years ago during the movement to end racial segregation, the Civil Rights Division historically has sought to combat discrimination and protect the constitutional rights of all Americans in everything from voting and housing to employment, education and policing. The division's priorities have shifted from administration to administration, although its core work has remained consistent.
But Dhillon, who was born in India and immigrated to the U.S. as a child, argues that over the years the division's mission has narrowed to protecting the rights of just one segment of society: people of color.
In her view, that has created a form of "benevolent racism" designed to punish "the descendants of those who may have been responsible for the sins of the past."
"As the logic goes, the white oppressors of years past kept Brown and Black people down, why not give them a taste of their own medicine?" she said last November at an event for the conservative Federalist Society. "That's the thinking really that underlies a lot of our civil rights enforcement work."
Transformed focus since Trump took over
That all changed, she said, in 2025 when President Trump returned to office and Dhillon arrived at the Justice Department.
Since then, the division has dropped investigations and withdrawn statements of interest in dozens of cases, including those involving voting rights, racial discrimination and civil actions against anti-abortion activists.
It has ended investigations into police departments over alleged constitutional violations.
Some of the most aggressive work of her tenure has been on the voting front, where the division has sent monitors to keep tabs on states' primary elections, and filed lawsuits demanding voter information from a slew of states, in furtherance of Trump's focus on alleged election fraud by noncitizens.
State election officials—Republican and Democratic—have pushed back, accusing the Justice Department of overreach. Judges have tossed more than two dozen of the department's lawsuits, including most recently in Georgia.
Education has been another active front.
In just the past two months, the Civil Rights Division has accused law schools at the University of California, Berkeley and Duke University as well as the medical schools at the University of California, San Francisco and George Washington University of discriminating against white and Asian students in admissions.
It also has sued UCLA and Harvard for allegedly allowing antisemitism to flourish on campus.
In August, a federal judge dismissed the department's lawsuit against Harvard, finding the claims of antisemitism were "too isolated and episodic" to prove the school was violating civil rights laws.
In a statement to NPR, Dhillon defended the division's work under her leadership.
"Under this administration, the division has held universities accountable for antisemitic harassment, defended the constitutional rights of Americans of every faith, and protected the integrity of federal elections," she said. "Civil rights laws exist to protect individuals from discrimination, and that is exactly how we enforce them. Critics calling equal enforcement 'weaponization' are telling on themselves."
While several sections have seen drastic changes in their work, not every unit has been affected to the same degree, three current and former division officials say.
Sections that address housing and disability rights, for example, are still doing a lot of the work they've traditionally done. Last year, for example, the department sued Uber for denying rides to passengers with service dogs or wheelchairs.
Out with the old, in with the new
One of the ways Dhillon has moved to implement her vision is through changes to those who do the work: the division's lawyers and staff.
Early on in her tenure, she accused division attorneys of pursuing a left-wing agenda.
"The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology," Dhillon told Glenn Beck in an interview last year. She encouraged attorneys and staff who didn't want to implement her vision of the division's mission to leave the department.
Up to 80% of the division staff did exactly that in a wave of departures that has decimated the division's institutional knowledge.
Much of the mass exodus occurred during the height of the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE cuts, and current and former division officials say many people left or opted to retire early to prevent staff cuts imposed from on high.
Current and former officials say that has left the division shorthanded—depleted of talent, expertise and basic manpower.
"There are so few people there doing civil rights work at all," said Georgetown Law professor Christy Lopez, who worked for more than a decade in the division before leaving in 2017.
Since Trump returned to office, some 300 attorneys have left the division, according to current and former officials. The Justice Department says some 130 have been hired to replace them.
There are now more division attorneys hired during the second Trump administration than there are holdovers from previous administrations, according to current and former officials.
Accusations of political hiring
Current and former officials say Dhillon has changed the hiring process, shrugging off rules that were meant to insulate it from partisan political considerations.
The rules were put in place some two decades ago after a scandal over political hiring during the George W. Bush administration, when the division lost some 70% of its attorneys and political appointees were accused of prohibiting attorneys from investigating cases.
In response, the division changed its policies to give non-political career staff a leading role in hiring. Career attorneys would review resumes, conduct interviews and then write a memo recommending a candidate to hire. The division's front office would then review the memo, and send it to the attorney general for a final decision.
The recommendation was almost always honored, current and former officials say.
"Those rules were put in place to prevent politics from dictating who gets a job with the Civil Rights Division rather than merit, rather than their experience and their skills and their commitment to civil rights work," Lopez said.
Under Dhillon, however, the front office, which is made up of political appointees and ideological allies, has removed the usual career staff from the process and taken the lead in hiring.
A Justice Department spokesperson denied that any changes have been made to the hiring process.
"Career staff hire career staff, just as in prior administrations. Any claim otherwise is a deliberate misrepresentation driven by political bias," the spokesperson said. "The result is 130 outstanding new attorneys, many of whom clerked for federal district and appellate judges. We are proud of every one of them, and they are already strengthening the Division's enforcement work."
But current and former officials say political ideology appears to be a significant factor in hiring decisions. Some of the new hires have previously worked for conservative legal groups, including the Pacific Legal Foundation and Only Citizens Vote Coalition.
There also are serious concerns about the qualifications of many of the people being hired.
Current and former officials say most of the attorneys who have been hired don't have much experience—if any—in civil rights work. Some of them have little legal experience at all, which has hampered some of the division's efforts to pursue Trump's agenda.
"I could understand it if Harmeet wanted to bring in people who could both further the president's priorities and also continue with the division's enforcement work, its traditional enforcement work," said Dena Robinson, who left the division last year and now works at the ACLU. "But that's just not happening anymore."
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