By May 2025, the DOJ Civil Rights Division -- created in 1957 to enforce federal civil rights laws -- experienced the most devastating personnel hemorrhage in its history. Approximately 250 attorneys, representing roughly 70% of the division's legal staff, had departed or submitted resignations since Trump's inauguration. By October 2025, the total exodus reached nearly 400 employees including 75% of all attorneys, reducing the division from approximately 380 lawyers to around 105.
The exodus was driven by the systematic transformation of the division under Harmeet Dhillon, confirmed by the Senate 52-45 on April 3, 2025, and sworn in as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights on April 7. Dhillon immediately began rewriting the mission statements for each of the division's 11 sections, replacing traditional civil rights enforcement priorities with Trump administration culture war objectives:
The voting section was gutted first: its chief and five senior managers were reassigned, all 29 active voting rights cases were ordered withdrawn, and the section's mission was rewritten from protecting voters from discrimination to ensuring elections "unmarred by fraud." Career attorneys across all sections were told they could no longer pursue the cases that had been the division's core work for decades -- employment discrimination, housing discrimination, police misconduct investigations, disability rights enforcement, and educational equity.
In December 2025, more than 200 former DOJ employees signed an open letter describing the "destruction" of the division, stating that the administration had turned its mission of defending civil rights "upside down" and was "weaponizing the country's civil rights laws against populations it's supposed to be protecting." Dhillon publicly welcomed the departures, calling them necessary to reshape the division.
The gutting of the Civil Rights Division eliminated the federal government's primary institutional capacity to enforce civil rights protections, effectively ending federal enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, and Fair Housing Act as they had been understood for six decades. Combined with the simultaneous destruction of the Public Integrity Section, the departures left DOJ unable to either protect civil rights or prosecute public corruption -- the two core functions that distinguish democratic governance from authoritarian rule.