Within days of being sworn in as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights on April 7, 2025 (confirmed by the Senate 52-45 on April 3), Harmeet Dhillon began systematically dismantling the DOJ Voting Section. The section voting chief and five senior managers were reassigned from voting rights work to a complaint adjudication office handling inter-employee disputes. All active voting rights cases — 29 were still pending — were directed to be withdrawn or dismissed. Career attorneys were instructed to stop enforcement of traditional voting rights protections.
The division's mission statement was rewritten to replace its historic focus on protecting marginalized voters from discrimination with a new priority: ensuring "elections unmarred by fraud, errors or suspicion." The shift from protecting the right to vote to policing voter eligibility represented a 180-degree reversal of the Voting Section's purpose since its creation under the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
The impact was devastating. By May 2025, approximately 250 attorneys — roughly 70% of the Civil Rights Division's lawyers — had left or submitted resignations. Over half of the division's approximately 380 attorneys either resigned or accepted deferred separation offers, reducing enforcement staff to around 105. By October 2025, the division had lost nearly 400 employees total, including 75% of its attorneys. The gutting of the Voting Section was a prerequisite for what came next: the DOJ's May 2025 demand letters to 44 states for voter data, reframing the Civil Rights Act of 1960 as a tool for voter surveillance rather than voter protection.