Harmeet Dhillon guts civil rights at the Justice Department

By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit · October 11, 2026

Harmeet Dhillon purged the Civil Rights Division of career lawyers to wage a partisan culture war, abandoning the vulnerable to serve political power.

Smashing the crown jewel of equal justice

We are living through the deliberate demolition of the only shield ordinary people have against discrimination. The Civil Rights Division was created to combat bigotry and protect constitutional rights in voting, housing, employment, education, and policing. Today, that crown jewel of the United States Department of Justice has been turned into a weapon for white grievance. Harmeet Dhillon took over as chief of the division following her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2025. Since then, she has pushed out hundreds of longtime attorneys and replaced them with inexperienced ideological allies. Up to 80% of the division staff have left the department, with some 300 attorneys abandoning ship.

To fill those empty desks, the Justice Department has hired 130 attorneys. NPR reports that these new hires include individuals who previously worked for conservative legal groups like the Pacific Legal Foundation and the Only Citizens Vote Coalition. Rolling Stone reports the inclusion of Barry Arrington, a gun-rights activist who argued for conversion therapy before the Supreme Court. David Michael Levin was sentenced to jail for hacking into election systems in Florida. Rolling Stone also uncovered the hiring of James Breslo, a man who promoted conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas mass shooting.

This staffing purge follows the exact playbook of the Trump administration's immigration own policies. Georgetown Law professor and former division employee Christy Lopez stated that to NPR. Those rules were put in place to prevent politics from dictating who gets a job with the Civil Rights Division rather than merit and commitment to civil rights work. But under Harmeet Dhillon, the front office has taken complete control of hiring and locked out career staff.

Abandoning the vulnerable to wage culture war

The consequences of this hostile takeover land squarely on the zip codes of working-class families and marginalized communities. Since 2025, the Civil Rights Division has dropped investigations and withdrawn statements of interest in dozens of cases involving voting rights and racial discrimination, while ending police department oversight. As a former employee told Rolling Stone, when a person facing discrimination reaches out to the U.S. government for help and actually gets an answer, only to have the agency suddenly disappear on them, the impact is devastating.

Instead of protecting vulnerable citizens, Harmeet Dhillon has weaponized the office's enforcement powers. The division has sent election monitors to states' primary elections. It filed lawsuits demanding voter information to investigate alleged noncitizen fraud, resulting in a dismal 0-23 court record, as documented by MS NOW. The division also launched heavy-handed investigations into elite universities over admissions and campus speech while actively dismantling protections for everyday borrowers and disabled Americans. Federal Register records show Dhillon signed the August 2026 rescission of the Interagency Statement on Special Purpose Credit Programs, ending federal backing for equitable lending tools. Dhillon also issued a July notice declaring the landmark Olmstead ADA integration guidance unenforceable.

When pushed on her extreme record, Dhillon told Glenn Beck that the job is to enforce federal civil rights laws rather than woke ideology. She proclaimed at a Federalist Society event in November that antidiscrimination work is driven by the logic of giving white oppressors a taste of their own medicine. That cynical rhetoric serves as cover for dismantling public mechanisms designed to give working people a fair shot.

A democracy dismantled by zealots

The defense offered by this administration collapses under the weight of its own failures. Apologists claim these changes simply inject fresh perspective into a stale institution. Federal judges have already dismissed more than two dozen of the department's lawsuits, including a recent case in Georgia. In August, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against Harvard because the claims of antisemitism were too isolated and episodic to prove a civil rights violation.

The historical pattern is unmistakable. Whenever a political movement captures the machinery of justice to persecute its enemies and reward its cronies, the rule of law is hollowed out from within. For this time to be different, the administration would have to abandon its crusade against civil rights protections and restore career professionals to their rightful roles. Instead, they double down on division, hiring lawyers straight out of law school. They offer cash bonuses to attorneys investigating youth transgender treatments and immigration policies, as reported by MS NOW.

We are left with an agency populated by right-wing kooks and election deniers who treat the Constitution as an enemy combatant. As Dena Robinson of the ACLU observed to NPR, the new leadership has completely abandoned the division's traditional enforcement work in favor of partisan posturing.

Harmeet Dhillon and her political patrons have traded equal justice under the law for a MAGA loyalty test. They abandon harassed citizens, dismiss civil rights complaints, and turn the people's legal defense fund into a cudgel for white grievance and corporate power.

Harmeet Dhillon guts civil rights at the Justice Department

Smashing the crown jewel of equal justice

Abandoning the vulnerable to wage culture war

A democracy dismantled by zealots

Sources