The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, built to fight Jim Crow, has been quietly restocked with an almost all-white army of attorneys — and a new report has named them.
For nearly 70 years, the division enforced voting rights, fair housing, and police accountability. Trump forced out roughly 75 percent of its lawyers, according to Public Citizen.
Their replacements are almost all white.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon swore in more than 100 of them last month and named none of them publicly, according to Public Citizen. In all, 368 employees left the Civil Rights Division after Trump took office, according to a Senate memo citing a Justice Department disclosure.
On the division's 68th anniversary last December, more than 200 former employees signed an open letter criticizing the Trump Justice department for gutting the division.
"But after witnessing this Administration destroy much of our work, we made the heartbreaking decision to leave — along with hundreds of colleagues, including about 75 percent of attorneys. Now, we must sound the alarm about the near destruction of DOJ's once-revered crown jewel," the letter read, per Al Jazeera.
Dhillon swore in the new group on July 8, posting group photos on X alongside two portraits of herself presiding over the ceremony, according to Public Citizen.
"[T]hese civil rights warriors will enforce our nation's laws to benefit ALL Americans, not just a select few," Dhillon wrote on X.
Before joining the Justice Department, Dhillon's law firm represented President Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and a Google engineer fired for writing a memo against diversity programs, according to the report.
Weeks after her confirmation, the division tore up consent decrees reached after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and closed investigations into six more police departments, the report said.
Her top deputy, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jesus Osete, marked the swearing-in by posting a parable on X, according to Public Citizen.
"I am building a Cathedral,'" Osete wrote, quoting a story about stonemasons.
Osete also attended meetings, beginning in fall 2025, of lawyers Trump tasked with reinvestigating his 2020 election loss — meetings that preceded the FBI's seizure of roughly 700 boxes of election records from Fulton County, Georgia in January 2026, according to Public Citizen.
At least five of the 11 attorneys Public Citizen identified arrived with documented records of misconduct, controversy, or irregular hiring, the report found.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Morrison, a career Justice Department attorney, tried to block his own colleagues from forming a union after Trump's 2024 election, then was rapidly promoted, the report said.
Acting voting section chief Eric Neff came from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, where he charged an election-software CEO based on a tip from an election-conspiracy group, according to Public Citizen.
The charges were dropped within weeks, citing potential bias. Los Angeles County paid $5 million to settle the resulting civil-rights lawsuit and publicly declared the CEO innocent, the report said.
Acting Second Amendment Section chief Barry Arrington represented Sidney Powell in a defamation suit over 2020 election conspiracy theories and helped a Colorado charter school block its valedictorian from coming out as gay at graduation, the report said.
Senior counsel Daniel Flickinger was forced to resign from a Birmingham, Alabama law firm in 2020 after a Facebook post about George Floyd's death, according to the report.
"Things I think about: If I were a seven-time felon, with my most recent prison stint stemming from robbing and holding a pregnant woman at gunpoint in her home, would I choose to die in a fentanyl and methamphetamine numbed strangulation if it meant being worshipped in a nationwide funeral and my family receiving millions of dollars? Purely hypothetical," the post read, per an Alabama Supreme Court opinion.
Flickinger now helps run the federal office that polices civil-rights compliance on college campuses, the report said.
Attorney Greta Gieseke was hired with just 11 months of non-clerkship legal experience and immediately detailed to Dhillon's office — bypassing an internal policy requiring three years of service before such a transfer — according to Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT).
Human Rights Watch released its own report on the division Wednesday, separately documenting the changes.
Journalists and civil rights lawyers began describing what was happening as the most severe rollback of federal civil rights enforcement since Reconstruction, Human Rights Watch found.
"The Trump administration is targeting efforts to address discrimination without offering any alternatives," said Trey Walk, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.
"[Y]ou have, in your own words, 'cleaned house,'" Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) wrote to Dhillon.
