The collapse of the Department of Justice

| 8:50 pm EDT May 1, 2025
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AG Pam Bondi and assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon have totally upended the civil rights division of the DOJ. Instead of fighting for the rights of minorities, women, and LGBTQ people, their sections are for “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling, Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports, and Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” The DOJ has also been pulled from voting rights cases in Geogia and Texas. As a result of this change, U.S. attorneys are leaving in droves. Who can blame them?

The DOJ civil rights division was established in 1957 as part of the Civil Rights Act. Attorneys were instrumental in enforcing voting rights and unconstitutional policing. Many of those lawyers joined to “fight the good fight” and felt proud of what they were doing by trying to give a leg up to marginalized people. While Dhillon claims that they will do things “differently than under President Biden,” the civil rights division was operating long before President Biden ever took office. This is merely more misinformation. Unlike Trump, Biden allowed the agency to focus on its mission by leaving them alone, which is what presidents are supposed to do. Trump, Bondi, and Dhillon have changed it to an “anti-woke” department.

Appearing with conservative commentator Glenn Beck, Dhillon said that once she and Bondi made clear the new mission of the Civil Rights Division, 100+ attorneys packed up and left. According to ABC News, the new “priorities” involve “unconstitutional policing to culture war issues.” Dhillon told Beck: “… [W]e [told] them, these are the President’s priorities, this is what we will be focusing on-you know, govern yourself according. And en masse, dozens and now over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do.” This nonsense was not a requirement of the job until Trump and his crazies came along. Dhillon is so good at what she does that she has led numerous unsuccessful lawsuits attempting to eliminate COVID-19 protections. Dhillon also assisted in trying to overturn the 2020 election and spearheads attacks against transgender people; she is against everything that civil rights laws existed to protect. In other words, what Dhillon and Bondi now call “civil rights” is anything but. They seek to tear down every protection that has been in place since 1950. They have the nerve to say that DOJ civil rights attorneys “don’t want to do their jobs.” That’s because this is not their job; it is the antithesis of their job.

Many civil rights attorneys joined DOJ to help uphold protections that have been in place for years, protections that allowed those with no voice to have one. That has been taken away from them, so why in the world would they want to stay with an agency that now represents everything they’ve spent their lives fighting against? The DOJ was supposed to be an impartial law enforcement agency, which it can no longer do under Trump, who wants his sticky little fingers in everything. All this is going to come back to haunt Republicans, and when they are sent home from Washington, they should understand why.