Trump Recasts Mission of Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Workplace, Prompting ‘Exodus’

A whole bunch of legal professionals and different workers members are leaving the Justice Division’s civil rights division, as veterans of the workplace say they’ve been pushed out by Trump administration officers who need to drop its conventional work so as to aggressively pursue instances towards the Ivy League, different faculties and liberal cities.

The wave of exits has solely accelerated in latest days, because the administration reopened its “deferred resignation program,” which might permit staff to resign however proceed to be paid for a time period. The provide, for individuals who work within the division, expires on Monday. Greater than 100 legal professionals are anticipated to take it, on high of a raft of earlier departures, in what would quantity to a decimation of the ranks of a vital a part of the Justice Division.

“Now, over 100 attorneys determined that they’d reasonably not do what their job requires them to do, and I feel that’s nice,” Harmeet Ok. Dhillon, the brand new head of the division, stated in an interview with the conservative commentator Glenn Beck over the weekend, welcoming the turnover and making plain the division’s priorities.

“We don’t need individuals within the federal authorities who really feel prefer it’s their pet undertaking to go persecute” police departments, she stated. “The job right here is to implement the federal civil rights legal guidelines, not woke ideology.”

Historically the division has protected the constitutional rights of minority communities and marginalized individuals, usually by monitoring police departments for civil rights violations, defending the suitable to vote and combating housing discrimination.

Now, greater than a dozen present and former civil rights division legal professionals say, the brand new administration seems intent on not merely modifying the route of the work, as has been typical throughout changeovers from a Democratic administration to a Republican one.