US Justice Dept civil rights unit faces mass exodus

By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON, July 23 (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department office tasked with protecting peoples' civil rights has lost 368 employees since President Donald Trump took office, in a mass exodus that has coincided with a dramatic policy shift away from its historical mission of protecting marginalized populations.

The staffing decrease at the Civil Rights Division, disclosed on Wednesday in a congressional memo from U.S. Senator Peter Welch, represents an unprecedented exodus of career officials who usually remain in their roles from administration to administration, regardless of political party. He said DOJ provided the figures to his office on July 15.

Prior to Trump's inauguration, the division employed more than 400 attorneys. Reuters could not determine how many of the departed 368 officials worked as attorneys, as opposed to other roles such as office support staff. Of those who left, 270 took the government's deferred retirement program while 98 resigned.

Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, released the figures ahead of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Wednesday where Harmeet Dhillon, Trump's head of the Civil Rights Division, testified before members of Congress for the first time since her confirmation hearing in February.

In his memo, Welch said that since Trump took office in January, the Civil Rights Division had disregarded its statutory responsibilities to enforce laws that prohibit discrimination, and had enabled civil rights violations to be committed against people and institutions as part of Trump's political agenda.

"The question before this Congress is whether we are going to save the Civil Rights Division or we’re going to destroy it," Welch said on Wednesday.

The Civil Rights Division's mandate dates back to the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which was initially enacted to protect the rights of Black people by undoing discriminatory Jim Crow segregation, enforce peoples' voting rights and pursue hate crime cases.

Congress has expanded the division's responsibilities over the years to include protecting Americans from discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, sex, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and military status.

Dhillon has upended the division's traditional enforcement priorities and refocused them on Trump's directives mandating such actions as curbing the use of diversity, equity and inclusion policies, banning transgender youth from playing on sports teams that do not align with their birth gender and prohibiting transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming care.

"Discrimination under the guise of DEI has permeated every level of our society," Dhillon told lawmakers on Wednesday.

"When I hear the words or the slogan DEI, what I hear is discrimination, exclusion and intolerance."

Earlier this year, Dhillon rescinded most of the investigative findings issued by the division during President Joe Biden's tenure, which documented widespread civil rights abuses by police departments against predominantly people of color or people with disabilities.

She also nixed two pending court-approved settlements to implement reforms with the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

The division's leadership has also ordered career staff to dismiss a variety of other ongoing civil rights cases involving discrimination against people of color, while simultaneously pursuing probes against jurisdictions and institutions it accuses of improperly implementing DEI policies on everything from college admissions to hiring.

Dhillon and some of the division's other politically-appointed attorneys have taken the unusual step of publicly announcing the targets of various employment discrimination probes, such as the University of California and George Mason University, over DEI policies or antisemitism.

On Wednesday, Dhillon told lawmakers that many of her office's investigations are being spawned by whistleblowers and the general public.

Since April, she said her office has opened investigations into 15 universities, 16 top law schools and seven medical schools over their admissions processes.