Trump and Harmeet Dhillon Move to Reform and Remake the Corrupt DOJ Civil Rights Division that has long been a tool of the Leftist to Cover up Everything from Election Fraud to Anti-White Racism
by Joe Cunningham, RedState.com, April 28, 2025
The Trump administration has shifted staff and undertaken a series of policy changes at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division that current and former staff say strike at the heart of its mission.
Justice Department leadership has in recent weeks directed attorneys to focus on priorities laid out in executive orders from President Trump, such as “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” and “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.”
NBC News and other outlets are breathlessly reporting that Trump’s team, led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, has reoriented the Civil Rights Division to focus on issues like keeping men out of women's sports, ending radical indoctrination in K-12 education, and defending Americans, including Christians, against discrimination.
“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 as they almost always have been.”
The department last week removed roughly a dozen career leaders from their positions, pushing some into unrelated roles responsible for responding to public information requests and a complaint adjudication office. Many have since resigned, leaving many sections without any leadership beyond political appointees, with additional departures expected.
"Civil Rights" Has Been Turned Into a Weapon
For years now, the term “civil rights” has been weaponized by the radical left. What was once about ensuring basic equality has morphed into a political cudgel used to target Christians, undermine women’s sports, and blur the meaning of words like “discrimination” beyond recognition. Civil rights laws were intended to ensure fairness, not to create a hierarchy where certain groups are favored while others are trampled.
Under the Biden administration, the Civil Rights Division became an engine for the far left’s social agenda, aggressively targeting police departments, promoting gender ideology, and even weaponizing the law against Christian Americans. What Dhillon and the Trump administration are doing isn’t an abandonment of civil rights — it’s a return to what civil rights are actually supposed to mean: protecting the constitutional rights of all Americans, not just the favored groups of the day.
Bureaucrats Don't Set Policy — The President Does
Another theme running through the establishment media's reporting is that career government lawyers are upset that their priorities have changed. To which I say: welcome to democracy. Bureaucrats (yes, even government lawyers) work at the pleasure of the President. They don't get to set national policy. The President does. That’s how our system works.
The complaints you’re hearing from these so-called “career civil servants” boil down to one thing: they don’t like that the voters elected someone who doesn’t share their priorities. They’re not neutral. They’re political actors, upset that the political winds have shifted against them. No Trump and Dhillon are finally throwing them out!
President Trump was elected — and re-elected — with a mandate to tackle this exact problem: an unelected, unaccountable administrative state that believes it knows better than the American people. Reclaiming the Civil Rights Division from far-left activists is part of fulfilling that mandate.
Americans Are Tired of the Radical Redefinition of Rights
At the heart of these reforms is something basic: Americans are sick of being told that defending biological women’s sports is bigotry. They’re tired of Christians being targeted by the same people who claim to champion "rights." They’re exhausted by bureaucrats using federal law as a bludgeon to reshape American culture in ways no legislature and no voters ever voted for.
What the Trump administration is doing isn’t radical. It’s restoring balance. It’s saying that civil rights are for everyone, not just for the politically favored classes. It’s reminding bureaucrats that their job is to enforce the law as written, not to invent new rights or agendas out of thin air.
The hand-wringing from NBC News and career DOJ employees proves that Trump’s team is hitting the right nerve. If this is what a “bloodbath” looks like inside the federal bureaucracy, we could use a lot more of it.
Trump Is Keeping His Promise
In 2016 and again in 2024, Americans elected Donald Trump because they were tired of watching their country be run by unelected elites who thought they knew better. Reining in a runaway Civil Rights Division that has been hijacked by radical ideology is a good step toward fulfilling the promises he made.
It's long past time we had a Civil Rights Division that protects all Americans, not just the politically connected ones. The Trump administration deserves credit for standing up to the bureaucratic swamp and fighting for the voters who put them there.
The sweeping changes come less than three weeks after the swearing in of Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights.
The former co-chair of Lawyers for Trump, Dhillon backed Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election and also was among those defending him against a Colorado lawsuit arguing he should be barred from running for office due to leading an insurrection.
The California lawyer has made a name for herself by championing conservative causes, suing on behalf of Trump supporters who said actions taken by San Jose police enabled a clash with counterprotestors. She represented a Google employee fired after he criticized the company’s diversity policy by arguing biology was to account for why there were fewer female engineers at the company. She also sued California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) over his stay-at-home order during the COVID-19 pandemic, challenging the law on behalf of churches and other entities.
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FULL DISCLOSURE: The We the People Convention has donated money to help Harmeet Dhillon fight many of the legal battles she has fought for Conservatives Causes over the years.
