Opinion - Under Trump, the division formerly known as ‘civil rights' is in peril

Yahoo

20-05-2025

The civil rights division used to be the crown jewel of the Justice Department. Now, because of the department's unbounded commitment to implement President Trump's agenda, it is a profound embarrassment — or it would be, if the ideological rigidity of the department's leadership were not such effective armor against that discomfort.
I have practiced law in Washington, D.C. for more than 45 years. In the Clinton White House, I was the liaison between the White House counsel's office and the Justice Department. I served during the Obama administration in the deputy attorney general's office, and in the civil rights division from 2022 until January 2025. In addition, over many years in private practice, I dealt frequently with the department, including in the aftermath of Watergate, and then under Reagan, both Bushes, and Trump.
I can say with certainty that the current assault on civil rights is not normal, and that this is not a proper way to run a law enforcement agency.
Although past Republican administrations have been accused of neglecting civil rights, none exhibited the Trump administration's destructive, nihilist hostility toward civil rights. Even if the department did not always combat racial discrimination with the vigor that critics wanted, at least it did not reflexively oppose such enforcement at the insistence of political taskmasters.
The Justice Department has always followed broad policy cues from the White House. But the Department has steadfastly cordoned off its enforcement decisions. I recall, when serving as senior counsel in the White House, being 'asked' to leave a meeting at Justice that unexpectedly turned to enforcement issues. At all times, I understood that the independence of the department was sacrosanct. Indeed, part of my job as a political appointee at the department was to insulate the nonpartisan career employees from political pressures. To my knowledge, no one suggested that career employees — in the argot of the current administration–needed to 'get with' the president's program or leave.
Regarding that agenda, I do not take issue with the civil rights division's announced intent to address antisemitism and discrimination against Christians. Such discrimination is invidious and merits investigation. The problem lies not in including those areas but rather in ignoring or discounting all the other forms of bias.
For example, the new assistant attorney general heading the civil rights division has issued new mission statements for each of the division's sections. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 is the foundational document for the housing section's efforts to combat discrimination. Yet the mission statement for the section reportedly does not mention it.
The mission statement for the voting section is similarly myopic. For much of the 20th Century, few Black people in the South could vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to end that disenfranchisement — to guarantee a right that, as President Lyndon Johnson put it, 'no American, true to our principles, can deny.' Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement fought, suffered, and died for this law. It was their seminal achievement and the touchstone of the work of the Voting Section.
Yet the new mission statement barely mentions the Voting Rights Act. Instead, it addresses fraud and noncitizen voting, minuscule problems in the American electoral system. It focuses not on discrimination but rather reflects Trump's flat earth conspiracy theory that he won the 2020 election.
The civil rights division has now sought to match the staffing of the section to its anemic mission, ousting the section's leadership, dismissing its cases, and reportedly reducing the legal staff to a grand total of three.
Magical thinking is not a viable law enforcement strategy. The department cannot stop discrimination by pretending it has ended. It cannot prevent voter suppression by ignoring it or stop assaults on the right to vote by concentrating paltry resources on fringe issues.
There is reason to fear that the department's skewed approach goes beyond hostility toward civil rights — that it actually furthers an anti-democratic agenda. Consider the context: While the Justice Department was busy gutting the voting section, Trump issued an Executive Order on elections (since overturned in court) that would have disenfranchised millions of American citizens and sought to disrupt the use of electronic voting machines.
In the meantime, the Department of Homeland Security has suspended the efforts of its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to help states harden their voting systems against cyberattacks. It has laid off the relevant employee, and ended funding to the group that coordinated security issues for the election community.
Further, the Attorney General disbanded the Justice Department task force fighting foreign attempts to influence U.S. elections and is dismantling the public integrity section of the department's criminal division, which has prosecuted voter fraud and intimidation. Interwoven with all these efforts is Trump's non-stop denial of the results of the 2020 election. These efforts undercut the operation and integrity of our electoral system and undermine public confidence in it, with the civil rights division in tow.
Since Attorney General Edward Levi in 1975 redeemed the Justice Department from the political abuses of Watergate, the department, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, has at least tried to maintain an appropriate level of independence, to enforce the law fairly against friend and foe, and to avoid any taint of partisanship — until now.
What is happening in the Justice Department, especially in the civil rights division, is not normal. The norm is to safeguard the integrity of law enforcement, to follow the law, to protect civil rights and to respect the Constitution. It is not to carry out the president's political agenda.
Robert Weiner formerly served as senior counsel in the front office of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. He is now director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights.
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