DOJ’s Civil Rights Division Gutted As Harmeet Dhillon Wages Trump’s Culture Wars

India-West News Desk

WASHINGTON, D.C. — More than 200 attorneys — nearly 70% of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — are expected to accept a second round of offers allowing them to resign while still being paid through September, CNN has reported.

The mass departure, unprecedented in scale, marks a profound transformation of the federal division historically tasked with protecting voting rights, fighting housing discrimination, and holding police departments accountable.

It comes under the new stewardship of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a civil rights attorney-turned-MAGA icon, who has vowed to realign the division’s mission with the priorities of the second Trump administration: combating “woke ideology,” investigating anti-Christian bias, and reversing key protections for LGBTQ Americans.

“We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute, you know, police departments based on statistical evidence or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities,” Dhillon said in a recent interview with Glenn Beck. “The job here is to enforce federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.”

Yet Dhillon’s own rise within Trumpworld is laced with contradictions — none more apparent than the irony at the heart of her current crusade.

When at the Republican National Convention she recited a traditional Sikh prayer, Dhillon was subjected to a barrage of hateful attacks from far-right figures, some of whom now support the very administration she helps lead. “This woman cursed our nation by hosting a prayer to a demon,” one posted on X. Another branded her a “pagan blasphemer.” Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, reacted to the prayer in real-time: “This is blasphemy. This is total blasphemy. Oh, fuck off. What a joke.”

The vitriol was so intense that Stop AAPI Hate — a coalition that typically focuses on progressive causes — issued a defense of two South Asian Republican women. “We call on GOP leaders to condemn the racist and bigoted attacks against Harmeet Dhillon and Usha Vance,” the group posted, referring also to JD Vance’s wife, who had been similarly targeted online. “All this vile racism, xenophobia & bigotry against South Asians, Sikhs & immigrants amid the RNC illustrates the severity of intolerance threatening the safety of so many communities today.”

Dhillon, who once defended Sikhs against racial profiling in the aftermath of 9/11, found herself the subject of the same ignorance she once fought. It’s a paradox that would be easier to dismiss if not for the policy implications now unfolding under her leadership. The Civil Rights Division, long focused on protecting minorities from discrimination, is being reoriented.

Dhillon appears undeterred. Her firm, which has received over $8 million from Trump-aligned PACs for legal services, remains deeply embedded in Trump’s legal and political infrastructure. And with hundreds of seasoned civil rights lawyers gone, she has a free hand to rebuild the division.