Trump Freezes DOJ’s Civil Rights Division

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) ordered its civil rights division to halt a majority of its functions, including a freeze on pursuing new cases, indictments or settlements, according to reporting from the Washington Post.

Per a memo sent to Kathleen Wolfe — President Donald Trump’s appointee as the temporary supervisor of the DOJ’s civil rights division until his nominee, Harmeet Dhillon, is confirmed by the U.S. Senate — the division is to not file “any new complaints, motions to intervene, agreed-upon remands, amicus briefs, or statements of interest.” 

The DOJ’s civil rights division is primarily tasked with enforcing laws prohibiting discrimination — from disability rights to housing, immigrant and civil rights — but it’s also the branch of the DOJ tasked with enforcing voting and election law. 

Dhillon, a longtime attorney who Trump picked to serve as assistant attorney general of civil rights, has a long history of working to roll back voting rights. Most of it is through the work of her law firm, the Dhillon Law Group, which has been involved in dozens of anti-voting lawsuits since its founding in 2006. In the past few years, Dhillon — or an attorney from her law firm — has been involved in more than a dozen different lawsuits in a handful of states, challenging voting rights laws, redistricting, election processes or Trump’s efforts to appear on the ballot in the 2024 election, according to Democracy Docket’s litigation tracker.

With Dhillon running the DOJ’s civil rights division, it’s a clear indicator that Trump plans to purge the department of career voting attorneys and use it to roll back voting rights, instead of enforcing them.

“It’s beyond unusual — it’s unprecedented. We’ve never seen this before at this scale with any transfer of power, regardless of the ideology of any incoming president or administration,” Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told the Washington Post about these changes to the DOJ’s civil rights division. “This should make Americans both angry and deeply worried. This is more than just a changing course of philosophy — this is exactly what most people [in the civil rights community] feared: a Justice Department that was created to protect civil rights literally abdicating its duty and responsibility to protect Americans from all forms of discrimination.”

Though the memo sent to Wolfe states that the DOJ’s civil rights division essentially freezes most of its activities, it does specify that work can continue on cases that have already been filed, as long as the judge overseeing them allows it. On Thursday, DOJ lawyers from the civil rights division showed up to oral argument in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to argue that Georgia’s congressional maps violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Amendment — a case that’s been ongoing since 2021.