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In another blow to civil rights under the Trump administration, the Department of Justice’s civil rights division has reassigned all managers working in the department’s voting section and suspended all active investigations being handled by the unit.
According to a Monday report from The Guardian, last week Tamar Hagler, chief of the DOJ’s voting rights section, and five other senior officials were reassigned to the department’s complaint adjudication office. The section was also ordered to dismiss active cases with no explanation. Those reassigned were nonpolitical career employees who typically remain in their roles through multiple presidential administrations.
Earlier this month Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon — a former legal adviser for Trump’s 2020 campaign — made clear that the DOJ’s civil rights division would be focused on promoting Trump’s agenda. Voting rights are not the only section impacted by the shake up, as other division leaders have also been moved out of their units, including managers who handled cases of police brutality and disability discrimination.
Dhillon has highlighted “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports” and “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” as new priorities of the civil rights division, according to memos obtained by NBC News.
In a weekend interview with conservative radio host Glenn Beck, Dhillon said that “we have made very clear last week in memos to each of the 11 sections in the civil rights division that our priorities under President Trump are going to be somewhat different than they were under President Biden.”
Dhillon added that “over 100” attorneys at the Justice Department had chosen to leave as a result of Trump’s agenda. “That’s fine. We need to replace those people,” she said, highlighting that the department would be shifting its focus to investigating things like discrimination against Christians and vaccine requirements during the Covid-19 pandemic. As the department pushes out attorneys and career employees who are not slavishly aligned with Trump’s agenda, the assistant attorney general also insisted that the civil rights division suffered from a lack of resources.
“You need more lawyers, investigators and commitment to do the work,” she said. “You need the people in the United States identifying these things. For us, we only have so many eyes and ears and hours in the day […] Put an attorney working on it. We’re gonna run out of attorneys to work on these things at some point.”
“People spend their whole careers [in the civil rights division] doing one particular kind of litigation, suing the police, suing the police, suing some more, suing employers, and it’s their part of it is a personal passion — well, this isn’t the personal passion department,” Dhillon continued. “There’s no menu here, this is not McDonald’s, you’re gonna have to do what’s on offer here.”
Since his inauguration, Trump and Republicans have leveled an all out assault against voting rights across the country. Last week, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives passed the SAVE Act — a law that would require proof of citizenship such as a passport or birth certificate in order to register to vote. Trump has signed executive orders effectively restricting the use of voting machines and absentee ballots in elections, as well as dedicating significant resources within executive agencies to investigations of flimsy claims of voter fraud.
While the president is signing plenty of executive orders, the first months of his administration have been defined by a blatantant picking and choosing of what rights are enforced for some, and denied to others. In the Department of Justice, expect to see few cases in the way of ensuring ballot access and fair election practices — and a lot more fishing expeditions into the fictional cases of voter fraud the president insists were responsible for his 2020 election loss.
