Harmeet Dhillon: Civil rights being rebuilt after ‘cultural shift’ under Trump

“…The Justice Department‘s Civil Rights Division is undergoing a complete internal transformation under President Donald Trump’s second term — not just of enforcement strategy but of personnel, institutional practices, and long-held assumptions about how federal civil rights laws should be applied.

“When my memos went out, that culture changed,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the division, told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview. “There’s literally been lawyers there who spent their entire careers — over 40 years — doing the same thing, no matter who the president is.”

More than half of the division’s attorneys left during the first quarter of this year, Dhillon said, clearing the way to rebuild the division from the ground up on the promise of sweeping changes under Trump. New hiring of career lawyers and political appointees is underway to align the department’s civil rights enforcement with what Dhillon elucidated as the plain text of the law and the trajectory set by the Supreme Court.

Dhillon explained to the Washington Examiner that many of the attorneys who left had worked under previous Democratic administrations and were not receptive to Trump’s directives…”