The US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has undergone a dramatic transformation under the Trump administration, with veteran lawyers warning the changes are deliberately destructive.
More than 300 of the division’s 400-plus attorneys have reportedly left over the past 19 months as its priorities shifted away from protecting historically marginalised communities.
The departures represent one of the most significant overhauls of the Civil Rights Division since its establishment more than 60 years ago.
In their place, the division has hired more than 80 lawyers whose backgrounds lie primarily in conservative advocacy and Republican politics.
The shift in personnel has been accompanied by a sharp change in the division’s focus, moving toward defending gun rights and fighting alleged anti-Christian bias.
Regan Rush, a longtime career lawyer in the Civil Rights Division, served as chief of its special litigation section until leaving the department in May.
Rush offered a stark assessment of what the new hiring strategy signals about the administration’s broader intentions for civil rights enforcement in America.
“The staffing really matches the mission [to] dismantle civil rights enforcement as we’ve known it for 60 years,” Rush said in comments given to Bloomberg Law.
“This is the demolition crew that they’ve hired,” she added, describing the influx of politically aligned attorneys as a deliberate effort to reshape the division’s core purpose.
Rush now leads Democracy Forward’s Red Line for Civil Rights, an initiative that tracks and analyzes the Trump administration’s civil rights enforcement efforts across federal agencies.
The scale of attorney departures from the division has alarmed civil rights advocates, who argue the institutional knowledge lost cannot be quickly or easily replaced.
Critics contend that the replacement of experienced civil rights lawyers with conservative advocates signals a fundamental abandonment of the division’s historical mandate to protect vulnerable groups.
The administration has not publicly addressed the specific concerns raised by Rush or the broader criticisms surrounding the restructuring of the Civil Rights Division.