When Harmeet Dhillon took over as the new chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division last April, the conservative attorney vowed to radically reshape the storied unit and its mission. Over the past 18 months, Dhillon has moved aggressively to make that goal a reality. She has pushed out hundreds of longtime attorneys, replaced many of them with inexperienced ideological allies, and used the division's enforcement powers to pursue President Trump's MAGA agenda, according to four current and former division officials.
Three of the individuals spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. At the root of these changes is Dhillon's vision of the Civil Rights Division and its mission that dramatically departs from tradition. Created almost 70 years ago during the movement to end racial segregation, the Civil Rights Division historically has sought to combat discrimination and protect the constitutional rights of all Americans in everything from voting and housing to employment, education and policing.
The division's priorities have shifted from administration to administration, although its core work has remained consistent. But Dhillon, who was born in India and immigrated to the U.S. as a child, argues that over the years the division's mission has narrowed to protecting the rights of just one segment of society: people of color. In her view, that has created a form of "benevolent racism" designed to punish "the descendants of those who may have been responsible for the sins of the past." "As the logic goes, the white oppressors of years past kept Brown and Black people down, why not give them a taste of their own medicine?" she said last November at an event for the conservative Federalist Society.
"That's the thinking really that underlies a lot of our civil rights enforcement work." That all changed, she said, in 2025 when President Trump returned to office and Dhillon arrived at the Justice Department. Since then, the division has dropped investigations and withdrawn statements of interest in dozens of cases, including those involving voting rights, racial discrimination and civil actions against anti-abortion activists. It has ended investigations into police departments over alleged constitutional violations.
Some of the most aggressive work of her tenure has been on the voting front, where the division has sent monitors to keep tabs on states' primary elections, and filed lawsuits demanding voter information from a slew of states, in furtherance of Trump's focus on alleged election fraud by noncitizens. State election officials—Republican and Democratic—have pushed back, accusing the Justice Department of overreach. Judges have tossed more than two dozen of the department's lawsuits, including most recently in Georgia.
Education has been another active front. In just the past two months, the Civil Rights Division has accused law schools at the University of California, Berkeley and Duke University as well as the medical schools at the University of California, San Francisco and George Washington University of discriminating against white and Asian students in admissions. It also has sued UCLA and Harvard for allegedly allowing antisemitism to flourish on campus.
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