Nearly three-quarters of the attorneys working for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division are leaving in protest of President Donald Trump's policies.
Around 250 attorneys — 70 percent of the division's total — have already left since Trump returned to office or will have left the DOJ by the end of this month after the administration radically reshaped its mission to fight discrimination, and focused instead on enforcing the president's executive orders, reported NPR.
"The Civil Rights Division exists to enforce civil rights laws that protect all Americans," said Stacey Young, a former division attorneywho left the DOJ in late January. "It's not an arm of the White House. It doesn't exist to enact the president's own agenda. That's a perversion of the separation of powers and the role of an independent Justice Department."
The division was established during the civil rights movement and the fight to end racial segregation, and its attorneys have worked for nearly 70 years to protect the constitutional rights of Americans on voting, housing, employment, education and policing, but the Trump administration instead wants them to look into alleged anti-Christian bias and roll back diversity, equity and inclusion programs in schools.
"The division right now is being decimated," said Young, who now runs the Justice Connection support group for DOJ employees. "The head of the division and the Justice Department have decided that the division is going to enforce laws only with respect to favored communities of people."
Trump appointed conservative attorney Harmeet Dhillon to head up the division, and she told the Federalist Society at a recent event that she intended to dramatically remake the Civil Rights division, where Republican administrations typically just slowed down its work.
"There really hasn't been a focus on turning the train around and driving it in the opposite direction, and that's my vision of the DOJ civil rights [division]," Dhillon said. "We don't just slow down the woke. We take up the cause to achieve the executive branch's goals. This is the opportunity where we can ensure that our nation's civil rights laws benefit all Americans, not just a select few."
There was no mass exodus of attorneys during the first Trump administration, although it scaled back some of the division's efforts, especially on policing. But current and former officials say the division seems to be weaponizing civil rights laws against populations they're supposed to be protecting.
"[The administration] is using a division that has a history of protecting the most vulnerable among us to actually wage an all-out assault on the civil rights of vulnerable people, including Black people, brown people, women, LGBTQIA folk," said Craig Futterman, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
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"I grew up in the wake of the civil rights movement where we celebrated all the heroes in the progress and the gains, and knowing that there's still so much work that needs to be done in this country," Futterman added, "and this is the most dramatic backward turn that I've experienced in my lifetime."
One official told NPR they had seen attorneys walking around the hallways in tears or sobbing through meetings,
"The division has a few hundred lawyers who were diligent in making sure that people were held accountable for discrimination," Young said. "Without that enforcement, without the knowledge that unlawful discrimination can be tamped down through the division's work, we're going to see, I think, a whole lot more unlawful discrimination."