‘Hundreds’ of Lawyers Quit DOJ’s AWOL Civil Rights Division as Dhillon Cleans HouseJoel B. Pollak 29 Apr 2025
Hundreds of lawyers are leaving the Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division — a division that had become notorious for partisan litigation, focusing on Democratic Party priorities instead of civil rights.
New DOJ Civil Rights chief Harmeet Dhillon said that the departing attorneys are welcome to leave, since many had placed politics ahead of the actual function of the department.
The New York Times reported:
“Now, over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do, and I think that’s fine,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the new head of the division, said in an interview with the conservative commentator Glenn Beck over the weekend, welcoming the turnover and making plain the division’s priorities.
“We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute” police departments, she said. “The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.”
The Civil Rights Division did nothing during the wave of antisemitism that rocked American campuses and cities after the Hamas terror attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. It focused instead on filing political cases against Republican states — such as a lawsuit in 2021 that targeted Georgia’s new voting integrity law, which was less stringent than laws in some Democrat-run states. (The Trump administration has dropped the case.)
The division had been politicized under previous Democrat administrations. Under President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Civil Rights Division Chief Tom Perez, for example, the division dropped an open-and-shut case against the New Black Panther Party for intimidating voters in Philadelphia. Members of the party had shown up at polling places in the 2008 election with nightsticks, threatening white voters.
The Civil Rights Division had also been critical to “consent decrees” imposed on local police departments during the heyday of the Black Lives Matter movement, when police were accused of “systemic racism.”
Under President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland and DOJ Civil Rights Division chief Kristen Clarke — who had a previous record of tolerating anti-Jewish hatred — had been silent about antisemitism.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/04/29/hundreds-of-lawyers-quit-dojs-awol-civil-rights-division-as-dhillon-cleans-house/
