The DOJ Civil Rights Division has lost more than 300 of its 400-plus lawyers over the past 19 months and is filling the gaps with attorneys from conservative legal groups and Republican political offices, according to a new Bloomberg Law analysis.
The Civil Rights Division is the part of the Justice Department that enforces the country’s anti-discrimination laws. It was created in 1957, during the civil rights movement, and for decades it has been the federal office that steps in when states and cities fail to stop discrimination in voting, housing, jobs, schools and policing.
Since April 2025, it has been run by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a California lawyer who previously represented Trump personally and worked on his campaign’s challenges to the 2020 election results.
According to Bloomberg Law, most of the positions left open by the departures have not been filled. Among the more than 80 new attorneys it identified, Bloomberg found lawyers who had worked at more than 20 conservative organizations, including America First Legal, the group founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, and the American Center for Law and Justice. At least four had worked for Republican members of Congress, and at least 12 had worked for Republican governors or state attorneys general. Bloomberg reports that overtly partisan backgrounds like these have historically been unusual for career hires in the division.
The Justice Department pushed back on the idea that the division is being hollowed out. It told Bloomberg Law that about 100 lawyers and staff have joined, another 100 are expected, and hiring is moving at five to ten lawyers a month. The department also said its hiring standards have not changed and that experienced career staff still screen and recommend candidates. Earlier Bloomberg Law reporting found that the division moved hiring power to a small group of managers aligned with Trump. That broke from rules put in place after a scandal over politically driven hiring under George W. Bush.
The new hires drew attention in July, when Dhillon posted a photo celebrating more than 100 new members of her team. According to reporting on the photo, only two of the new hires appear to be Black.The work is changing along with the staff. The DOJ Civil Rights Division now has its own Second Amendment Section, the first unit in its history dedicated to expanding gun rights. It has brought cases against Los Angeles County, Washington, D.C., Denver, Colorado, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. To do it, the division is using a federal law that was long used to go after police departments with a pattern of brutality or misconduct.
The division is also going after voter data. It has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., demanding their voter registration files, saying it needs them to make sure the lists are properly maintained and to look for noncitizen voting. Those files can include birth dates, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers. Courts have not been on the department’s side. The division has lost 23 of these cases so far, including in Maryland, where a federal judge ruled the state did not have to turn over its full, unredacted voter file.
Colleges are another major target. The department created what it calls a Civil Rights Fraud Initiative, which uses the False Claims Act against schools and other organizations that receive federal money and are accused of allowing antisemitism or using illegal diversity policies. The False Claims Act is a law that lets the government recover money from anyone who defrauds it, and it allows for triple damages plus penalties. That gives the government huge leverage over universities. At a private event last year, Dhillon said, “I’m going after Harvard.”
Dhillon has also made anti-Christian bias, free speech and equal treatment for conservatives central to the division’s mission. Bloomberg Law identified immigration as another growing area of both litigation and hiring.
At the same time, the division has pulled back from some of its best-known work. In May 2025, the department moved to drop proposed consent decrees with the police departments in Louisville and Minneapolis. A consent decree is a court-enforced agreement that requires a police department to make reforms under outside monitoring. Those deals followed the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. The department also closed investigations and withdrew earlier findings against police agencies in Phoenix, Memphis, Trenton, Mount Vernon, Oklahoma City, and the Louisiana State Police.
Dhillon has described those agreements as an effort to “handcuff” local police. The department said the earlier investigations relied on flawed methods and treated statistical differences as proof of intentional discrimination.
Human Rights Watch sees it differently. In an August report, the group said the withdrawals ended federal oversight before anyone independently confirmed the problems had been fixed. It also pointed to the division pulling out of a Georgia Voting Rights Act case and reversing its position in Texas redistricting litigation. Redistricting is the process of redrawing voting district lines.
According to Reuters, the division’s Criminal Section, the unit that investigates individual officers for excessive force, dropped from about 40 trial attorneys to no more than 13, based on accounts from former lawyers. The department gave Reuters a count of more than 25 when supervisors and advisers were included. Reuters also found that federal charges under the law most often used in excessive-force cases fell about 36% in 2025, to 54 cases, the lowest since 2020.
The Justice Department told Reuters it still enforces civil rights laws “aggressively and efficiently,” judges each case on its merits, and continues to prosecute law enforcement sexual assault and hate crimes. It said a nationwide unit has to prioritize limited resources.
The division’s leadership says it is enforcing the law evenly for every American and fixing years of neglect toward religious liberty, free speech, election integrity and gun rights. Former division lawyers say the mass departures, centralized hiring and dropped cases have gutted the protections Black communities have relied on for generations. In December, more than 200 of them signed an open letter warning of the division’s “near destruction.”
The midterm elections will be the next big test. The DOJ Civil Rights Division is responsible for enforcing federal voting rights laws, and it is heading into November with a very different staff and a very different set of priorities than it had two years ago.
