Donald Trump’sappointees at the Department of Justice have removed all of the senior civil servants working as managers in the department’s voting section and directed attorneys to dismiss all active cases, according to people familiar with the matter, part of a broader attack on the department’s civil rights division.
The moves come less than a month after Trump allyHarmeet Dhillonwas confirmed to lead the civil rights division, created in 1957 and referred to as the “crown jewel” of the justice department. In an unusual move, Dhillonsent out new “mission statements”to the department’s sections that made it clear the civil rights division was shifting its focus from protecting the civil rights of marginalized people to supporting Trump’s priorities.
Tamar Hagler, the chief of the voting section, which is responsible for enforcing federal laws designed to prevent voter discrimination, and five top career managers were all reassigned last week to the complaint adjudication office, a little-known part of the department that handles employee complaints, according to people familiar with the matter. A career line attorney in the section has also been reassigned to the complaint adjudication office.
The voting section had seven managers in January overseeing around 30 attorneys. Of the two other managers, one retired and another was detailed to work on an antisemitism task force.
Political appointees have also instructed career employees to dismiss all of their active cases without meeting with them and offering a rationale – a significant break with the department’s practices and norms.
The justice department did not return a request for comment.
Taken together, the changes have raised significant alarm about what the future of voting rights enforcement will look like for the federal government at a moment when states continue to pass restrictive voting measures.
It also raises concern about future political interference. The justice department’s civil rights division has long had resources and a credibility that private plaintiffs can’t match. And much of that reputation is driven by the fact that the day-to-day work is carried out by non-political, career staff, whose work is supposed to be apolitical.
“The career managers established norms and standards and made sure that the section spoke consistently, over time, with one voice,” said a former justice department employee. “That is destroyed by gutting all the career managers.”
The voting sectiondismissedits last active case on Monday – a challenge under the Voting Rights Act to how the city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania elects its city council. In March,it alsodismissed a similar case in Houston county, Georgia. (The department technically has one voting case that is still active, but a judge paused the case this week).
The changes are part of a larger wave of about a dozenreassignmentsof senior personnel in the civil rights division this week. Several other components of the division, including the special litigation section, have also been hit with significant losses in personnel. The moves came a week ahead of a 28 April deadline for employees to decide whether to accept a deferred resignation offer.
Reassigning the most experienced managers to low-level duties appears to be an overt push to crush morale, make it clear management is not going to bring civil rights enforcement cases, and get lawyers to accept the offer to leave the department, department veterans say. Many of the division’s lawyers are expected to accept the offer.
“This is what you do when you don’t really know what the section does and just want to create chaos in the simplest way possible that doesn’t involve you reading anything,” said one former voting section attorney. “It is extremely clear that the intent is to get absolutely nothing done. And the effect will be that absolutely nothing gets done.”
Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his effort to try and overturn the 2020 election, has called for mass firings in the civil rights division. “Every lawyer in the Voting Section and likely in the Civil Rights Division needs to be terminated. They are not supportive of Pres Trump or MAGA. There has to be a reckoning. These are leftwing activists who have come from and should return to their leftwing organizations,”she wrote in a post on Xshortly after the election.
The American Accountability Foundation, a dark money group that created a“DEI watch list”of federal employees,also sent a letterto the attorney general, Pam Bondi, last year urging her to fire certain lawyers in the voting section.
Removing the career managers ishugely consequential in the justice department. In addition to having decades of experience, they act as a buffer between the political attorneys in a section’s front office and the apolitical career line attorneys. They review investigations and justification memos arguing for bringing cases or not, and present them to the political appointees.
They also handle hiring. While there’s currently a hiring freeze, removing the career managers could pave the way for politicized hiring and a “partisan and ideological capture” of an agency that is supposed to be non-partisan, a former department employee said.
“Demolishing the line between career and political employees is very possible, because the people who run the hiring process are normally the career managers, but if you replace all the career managers and then have new political people they could staff up very differently,” the former department employee said.
Since the start of the Trump administration, the justice department has dismissed big cases challenging a sweeping voting law in Georgia and a major case challenging electoral districtsdrawn in Texas. It has also dismissed casesin VirginiaandAlabamathat sought to stop the states from being too aggressive in removing people from their voter rolls.
Before the Texas redistricting case was dismissed, there was a perfunctory meeting between political appointees and career staff in which political appointees had not bothered to read materials in advance, according to the former department employee. They have refused meetings to discuss dismissals since, the person said, and political appointees have not even bothered to learn the names of career attorneys.
“Even if you don’t think that some claims should have been brought, it’s not plausible that every case in the hopper is unmerited, by any interpretation of the rules,” said Justin Levitt, a former top official in the civil rights division during the Obama administration. “An instruction to drop a case without an explanation of why is just a decision to refuse to enforce the law.”
“Dropping those cases without explanation is simply arbitrary – and ‘arbitrary’ is exactly what you don’t want from the country’s lead agency of law enforcement,” he added.
In some cases, justice department leadership has publicly antagonized the work of career personnel. On 31 March, Bondi issued a press release announcing she had ordered the department to dismiss its challenge to the Georgia voting law, saying the Biden administration had “fabricated a narrative”. Chad Mizelle, the department’s chief of staff,called the suit a “disgrace”.
People familiar with the voting section emphasized that the administration’s approach is significantly different from the way the section was run during the first Trump term. Even though the voting section’s work slowed considerably during Trump’s first term, and it switched positions in some major cases, there was a general respect and collegiality for the career employees. Eric Dreiband, who led the civil rights division from 2018 to 2021,resignedafter the January 6 attack on the US capitol.