Since President Trump was inaugurated, the Justice Department has driven out approximately 75% of attorneys from the Civil Rights Division. It’s also radically scaled back enforcement of the nation’s civil rights laws and constitutional protections.
Justice Connection has spoken out in the national media more than any other organization about what this unprecedented abdication of responsibility will mean for Americans—far more unlawful discrimination at work, at school and in housing will go unchecked; access to facilities and education for people with disabilities will narrow; and police misconduct, hate crimes, and prison abuse will escape redress.
Since it was created nearly 70 years ago, the Civil Rights Division has made our country a fairer, safer, and more equal place to live. Because the dedicated employees who’ve made that work possible can’t speak out themselves, Justice Connection is making sure the administration’s assault on the division—and on our nation’s commitment to civil rights—generates the attention it deserves.
November 25, Reuters: US Justice Department plans gun rights office within civil rights unit
The reorganization is another step in a series of actions by the Trump administration to redefine civil rights with policies championed by conservatives, a departure from traditional civil rights issues including racial discrimination and policing.
“The Civil Rights Division’s new focus on the Second Amendment, which is far outside its longstanding mission, is moving us even further away from our nation’s commitment to protecting all Americans’ civil rights,” said Stacey Young, a former Civil Rights Division attorney.
November 19, Mother Jones: At the Justice Department, civil rights now means gun rights
Career staff and leadership have been forced out under Dhillon. Figures the DOJ gave Congress and a list of departures released in October by Justice Connection, a network of agency alumni, suggest that nearly 400 people, including 75 percent of attorneys, have left the division since January.
September 7, The Sunday Times: Civil rights? US justice department is more interested in Trump’s foes
Over the division’s 70-year history, change has not been uncommon. Priorities shift depending on who is in the White House, but the job remains the same: enforcing the laws on the books to ensure US citizens, regardless of status, race or gender, are treated fairly.
This Trump-inspired overhaul was different, said Jen Swedish, who left in May after more than 15 years at the division, a period of four presidential administrations. She is deputy director of Justice Connection, an advocacy group set up by former DoJ employees to support those still at the department or who are looking for new jobs.
“This is not the neutral application of the law,” she said. “What’s happening here is you have political appointees identifying targets of investigations based on the president’s tweets. These are politically motivated investigations. The cart before the horse of this administration is appalling.”
August 27, ProPublica: The leader of Trump’s assault on higher education has a troubled legal and financial history
Career civil rights officials, many of whom had served under both Democratic and Republican administrations, were horrified. . . . Former civil rights deputy chief Jen Swedish, who worked at the Justice Department for 15 years, called the actions “cover for attacking higher ed.”
June 23, San Francisco Standard: The San Francisco lawyer rewriting civil rights in Trump’s America
Dhillon’s arrival coincided with hundreds of attorneys leaving the division. Resignations and early retirements have reportedly accounted for a 70% reduction in staff.
***
Stacey Young, a DOJ attorney of 18 years who worked in the Civil Rights Division before resigning in January, told The Standard that [Associate Attorney General Harmeet] Dhillon’s agenda is “the definition of politicization and weaponization.”
“She made it clear that the division is going to focus on voter fraud, which is largely a political fiction,” said Young, who launched the Justice Connection, a nonprofit consisting of former DOJ attorneys. “Focusing on voter fraud means there are going to be many more people denied access to the vote, and there’s going to be less oversight over whether Americans’ votes matter.”
June 5, Law.com: Former DOJ civil rights lawyers flooding DC litigation market
After 15 years on the job, there was no cake and no farewell party when Jen Swedish put in her last day at the Department of Justice on May 23. So many people have been leaving her section—five on that day alone—that there isn’t time to honor all the departing colleagues.
Swedish, a former deputy chief in the Civil Rights Division, decided to leave after being told that lawyers in her section would be reassigned to enforce President Donald Trump’s executive orders. Swedish had been planning to stick it out for a while, but then she got the chance to join a buyout program. And section leaders told their staff that if they didn’t take the buyout, there was no promise they would have a job, Swedish said. Then she knew what was coming when the mission statements were rewritten for every section in the division.
June 3, Chicago Tribune: Justice Department investigation of racial hiring at City Hall also highlights President Donald Trump’s own hiring record
According to Justice Connection, a network of former Justice Department lawyers, about 70% of the civil enforcement attorneys have been forced out of the civil rights division. In January, the division had 365 attorneys, but now there are only 110 left. Just five of the 35 lawyers enforcing employment discrimination laws are still on the job.
Stacey Young, executive director and founder of Justice Connection who once worked in the civil rights division, said the new direction under Trump undermines civil rights laws. “Targeting employers for DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility) initiatives isn’t something that’s contemplated by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the precedent that has evolved interpreting that statute. It’s a political stunt, and they’ve weaponized the civil rights division to advance it,” she said.
Young also questioned the Trump administration’s handling of the investigation into Johnson’s office, pointing out that Dhillon sent a letter the day after Johnson made the comments touting the Black members of his administration.
“It is at the very least extremely unusual — and possibly unprecedented — that an investigation like this by the employment litigation section of the civil rights division would have been opened based only on comments like those,” she said.
“What the mayor said was, ‘We have hired a lot more Black people.’ He didn’t seem to suggest, ‘We made it clear that we were only hiring Black people. We are denying non-Black people jobs,’” she said. “Simply celebrating that greater diversity exists is not the same as discrimination.”
May 19, NPR: Trump’s push to reshape the DOJ’s civil rights division sparks mass exodus of attorneys
‘“The Civil Rights Division exists to enforce civil rights laws that protect all Americans,” said Stacey Young, a former division attorney who left the department in late January. “It’s not an arm of the White House. It doesn’t exist to enact the president’s own agenda. That’s a perversion of the separation of powers and the role of an independent Justice Department.”
***
Young said the changes amount to the destruction of the division and its traditional work.
“The division right now is being decimated,” said Young, who now runs Justice Connection, a group of department alumni that provides support to DOJ employees. “The head of the division and the Justice Department have decided that the division is going to enforce laws only with respect to favored communities of people.”
May 14, The Guardian: US justice department asks civil rights division attorneys to stay after mass exits
While justice department leadership has cheered departures from the civil rights division, the recent requests suggest the agency may be scrambling to find attorneys to work on the matters the Trump administration wants to prioritize, including investigations into allegations of antisemitism on college campuses, protecting white people from discrimination, and limiting the rights of transgender people.
“In addition to treating the civil rights division staff with complete disrespect, they’re also utterly incompetent,” said Stacey Young, who started Justice Connection, a group for department alumni, earlier this year after quitting the agency. “They drove people out and only after the fact seem to have realized that that was a terrible idea.”
Harmeet Dhillon, a Donald Trump ally who leads the civil rights division, has celebrated the departures. “Over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do, and I think that’s fine,” she said in a 26 April interview on conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s podcast. She also has said she has “more applicants than I can possibly hire right now”.
Young said that justice department job postings must be publicly advertised and that the department currently had none posted for the civil rights division. “Where are these applicants coming from?” she said.
May 14, The Marshall Project: DOJ Shakeup May Put Civil Rights Probe of 1970 Jackson State, Mississippi, Killings At Risk
“The division is now focusing on protecting the people who this White House prefers,” said Stacey Young, a former Justice Department lawyer and founder of Justice Connection, a network of agency alumni that provides resources, including legal counsel and mental health services. “Their new enforcement priorities, which they’ve made very clear, are trying to tamp down on antisemitism, on anti-Christian bias and on efforts to advance gun control.”
Oneshia Herring—a Justice Connection advisory board member, former chair of the Department of Justice’s Association of Black Attorneys, and a former attorney in the Civil Rights Division—said the administration’s selective enforcement of the law is “running against the very nature and spirit of which these laws were created.”
May 12, Democracy Docket: DOJ Voting Section Has Just Three Lawyers Left, Watchdog Estimates
“The Trump administration is saying they don’t believe in civil rights enforcement anymore,” Stacey Young, the founder of Justice Connection and an 18-year veteran attorney in the civil rights division, told Democracy Docket about the changes. “They don’t think it’s important to ensure that everybody has the right to vote, regardless of who they are, and that their vote matters.”
Young called the DOJ’s shift in directives and the mass exodus of attorneys from the civil rights division a “decimation of the entire division.”
“I think that the consequences from the destruction of the civil rights division are pretty clear,” she said. “We’re going to have unchecked discrimination in employment and in housing, and fewer people are going to have access to vote. We’re going to have unchecked police misconduct. We’re going to have hate crimes go unprosecuted. We’re going to have prison abuses continue with no redress.”
May 3, Associated Press: Justice Department will switch its focus on voting and prioritize Trump’s elections order, memo says
“The Civil Rights Division has always worked to make sure Americans have access to the polls and that their votes matter,” said Stacey Young, an 18-year Department of Justice veteran who left that division days after Trump’s inauguration in January and founded Justice Connection, an organization supporting the agency’s employees. “The division’s job is not to promote the politically expedient fiction that voting fraud is widespread.”
May 1, The Guardian: Justice department civil rights division loses 70% of lawyers under Trump
Stacey Young, a former civil rights division attorney who started the group Justice Connection, a network of department alumni supporting their former colleagues, called Dhillon’s message “sadistic.”
“They made a concerted effort to purge dedicated career civil servants at the civil rights division. And slamming them for leaving is cruel,” she said. “I’ve never seen DoJ employees treated with the kind of malice from their own government, like we’re seeing now.
“They were involuntarily reassigned. They were told to take the deferred resignation offer. And it was suggested to them that if they didn’t, they could be laid off. So the message was clear: ‘If you’re not on board with what we’re doing, if you’re not on board with the president’s own policy agenda, get out.’”
April 29, MSNBC: Justice Connection Founder Stacey Young on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House
April 28, New York Times: Trump Recasts Mission of Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Office, Prompting ‘Exodus’
Stacey Young, who once worked in the division as a lawyer and is now the executive director of Justice Connection, an organization of former department officials, voiced alarm about the consequences.
“With the reckless dismantling of the division,” she said, “we’ll see unchecked discrimination and constitutional violations in schools, housing, employment, voting, prisons, by police departments and in many other realms of our daily lives.”
April 28, Washington Post: Civil rights lawyers leave en masse as Justice Dept. mission shifts
“For almost 70 years, the civil rights division has enforced laws that Congress passed to promote equality, dignity and fairness for all Americans,” said Stacey Young, a former civil rights attorney who left this year and founded Justice Connection, an advocacy organization for former Justice Department employees. “By effectively purging the vast majority of the division’s lawyers, DOJ is grinding this work to a near halt.”
April 28, The Hill: Critics see ‘monumental shift’ in Trump remaking of DOJ civil rights division
“The impact is catastrophic. They are scaling back possibly, nearly all enforcement that they have been doing for decades on civil rights statutes they’re required to enforce,” said Stacey Young, a longtime Civil Rights Division attorney who now runs Justice Connection.
“This is a monumental shift in the way the division operates, and it’s going to result in American civil rights not being protected.”
***
Young said the widespread resignations have crushed morale at the department.
“What I’m seeing and hearing is just trauma. And I think in the last few days, employees have kind of come to accept the fact that they are just destroying the division. I think people were very hopeful that some of their important work would be preserved, but I think people are losing hope in that possibility,” she said.
“There’s just despair. These are people who joined the department to make a career of enforcing civil rights laws at the most important, consequential place to do it, and now they’re seeing that place destroyed.”
April 28, Bloomberg: DOJ Civil Rights Unit Makes Sharp Turn Toward Trump Causes
Stacey Young, a former attorney with the division who founded Justice Connection, to support current and former DOJ employees, said the recent reassignments have had “a very destabilizing effect” on the career workforce, and the resignations that result will cause the division “to lose an immense amount of institutional knowledge.”
“I’ve never heard my former colleagues sound so defeated and scared for the future of their work, and also their own jobs. There’s enormous fear and anxiety about the division’s future,” Young said.
April 23, NBC News: Trump upends DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sparking ‘bloodbath’ in senior ranks
“Every presidential administration has its own policy priorities,” said Stacey Young, who spent 18 years in the division before resigning in January, “but I don’t think there’s any precedent for an administration almost completely refocusing the civil rights division’s enforcement priorities the way this one has.”
“The loss is truly hard to quantify,” added Young, who co-founded Justice Connection, a group now trying to highlight Trump administration changes to the Justice Department. “Vital civil rights work is not going to get done.”
