DOJ Fires and Reassigns Civil Rights Lawyers as New Hires Arrive

The Justice Department civil rights division’s much shrunken career staff is facing new firings, forced reassignments, and demands for summaries of recent work as its leaders hire outside attorneys and redirect the division’s mission.

Taken together, the personnel moves reflect the Trump administration ramping up what’s already been a rapid overhaul of the division’s traditional priorities, and come after roughly 75% of career lawyers have left in recent months.

Several employees focused on housing discrimination have been required to stay at the voting section full-time, after they initially accepted part-time voluntary details, said three people familiar with the situation.

The voting office has lately prioritized election integrity matters and enforces a voting rights statute that the division’s leader, Harmeet Dhillon, recently leveraged in support of President Donald Trump’s push for Texas redistricting.

Roughly a half a dozen others within the immigrant and employee rights section were involuntarily detailed to the division’s employment litigation section, which is probing universities’ hiring practices as part of the administration’s anti-DEI emphasis, according to the three sources, who discussed personnel developments on condition of anonymity.

As the division sends more resources to the employment section, two civil rights attorneys were terminated this month toward the end of their probationary employment periods, including one employment lawyer, according to the people. The probationary period generally applies to people hired in the prior one to two years, after which they have stronger job protections.

Out of roughly 400 division attorneys at the start of the Trump administration, about 300 have left this year, Dhillon said on a Breitbart News podcast Aug. 17.

The remaining lawyers were directed this month to submit a writing sample and a docket memo that summarized their work over the past six months, two people said.

At the same time, a new wave of hiring begins filling the division’s roster this week. Attorneys are starting in several sections, including the education and employment sections, in the coming weeks, they added. Dhillon has been steadily adding political appointee as well.

Dhillon posted a photo on X Monday of herself and 12 others, declaring that her team is “excited to welcome a new class of Civil Rights Warriors to” DOJ.

“The mission and work of every section at the Civil Rights Division is important and it is a privilege to work here,” a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement. “The Division routinely evaluates staffing resources to allocate them in the most effective manner. We are fortunate that many qualified individuals who are excited to serve the American people have applied for positions within the Division.”

Shifting Priorities

The forced details to high-priority areas, terminations, and outside hiring come as the second Trump administration has shifted away from police abuse and racial bias cases to start targeting universities over their diversity and hiring programs and cracking down on alleged voter fraud.

“Every day as I turn up the ante, just as a manager, and said, ‘Hey what have you done lately? Show me your work product,’ more people are quitting,” Dhillon said on the Breitbart podcast, with a laugh.

Dhillon added that she’s working to hire new career lawyers “who want to do the work as Congress wrote the laws and the courts interpreted the laws, not some left wing agenda. And we have tons of resumes” and “will be staffing up.”

In addition to the line attorney exits, the departures of at least seven section chiefs have left vacancies in key posts across the division.

The voting section is now led in an acting capacity by Maureen Riordan, who previously worked for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative legal group whose stated mission is to “fight against lawlessness in American elections.”

More than a dozen Senate Democrats raised concerns in a July letter to political leadership that the voting section “has abandoned its longstanding mission to conduct meaningful voter protection work and will instead act to perpetuate the myth of widespread voter fraud.”

New Employment Chief

Career lawyer Jeffrey Morrison has been tapped to lead both the employment litigation and educational opportunities sections, which both lost their section leaders earlier this year, said four people familiar with the matter.

Morrison joined its front office at the start of the second Trump administration. Earlier this year, when represented by the National Right to Work Foundation, he filed a challenge to a federal worker union’s effort to represent the civil rights division.

Dhillon, who as political leader has emerged as the public face of the division’s shift, is a San Francisco lawyer who previously represented Trump in his personal capacity and has argued conservative positions in cases involving religious liberty, treatment for transgender minors, and censorship on college campuses.

Earlier this year, the division asked in an internal posting for up to five lawyers to join the education section on a four-month detail. The memo cited “a surge staffing need to address Administration priority work in combating antisemitism in schools, Title IX, and discriminatory college admissions practices.”