Current and former officials with the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division say the Trump administration's moves to change the department have forced out employees in what one senior attorney said has been a "complete bloodbath."
The changes, which have not been widely publicized, come as the administration has implemented new priorities that former and current officials said upend the division's mission to enforce laws prohibiting housing, voting, and hiring discrimination, NBC News reported Wednesday.
Sources commented that the administration has reassigned more than a dozen senior lawyers, with some choosing to resign after they were moved to roles unrelated to their areas of expertise.
Last week, new division head Harmeet Dhillon issued several directives to outline the department's new priorities that differ widely from how both GOP and Democrat administrations enforced civil rights law, including during President Donald Trump's first administration.
According to the memos, obtained by NBC News, the division now must pursue priorities that were laid out in Trump's executive orders, including "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports" and "Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling."
The DOJ has not publicly announced the changes, some of which were reported first on Tuesday by Reuters.
"This is a 180 shift from the division's traditional mission," a former senior official in the decision commented, while declining to be named.
"These documents appear to have been created in a vacuum completely divorced from reality," the former official said. "The division can only enforce statutes that have been passed by Congress, and these orders seem to contemplate division attorneys executing on work that fundamentally departs from the division's long-standing mission."
Dhillon said in a statement that the changes reflect how "each new administration has its own priorities and allocates resources accordingly."
"The Trump administration is no different," she said. "When I assumed my duties as Assistant Attorney General, I learned that certain sections in Civil Rights had substantial existing caseloads and backlogs, and that formed the basis of temporary details to assist those sections in getting, and staying, caught up."
She insisted that the Civil Rights Division "looks forward to continuing to aggressively protecting the civil rights of Americans."
Stacey Young, who spent 18 years in the division before resigning in January, acknowledged that every administration has its policy priorities, but said she does not believe there is "any precedent for an administration almost completely refocusing the civil rights division's enforcement priorities the way this one has."
Young, who co-founded Justice Connection, a group trying to highlight the Trump administration's changes to the DOJ, added that "Vital civil rights work is not going to get done."
NBC's sources said the changes that have already happened in the division are far different than those during Trump's first term.
"I was there almost 18 years, and what's happening now is basically the opposite of what we've been doing," a veteran lawyer who recently left the department said. "In the first Trump administration, they engaged with us as attorneys. The political appointees were normal lawyers. Sometimes we persuaded them and sometimes they disagreed, but there was always a conversation about why and what the law required. That is not happening."
Another former attorney said the administration is "withdrawing everything we've done and taking the opposite side on voting rights."
"This is not 'Oh, we want to do more religion cases' or 'We don't want to do creative redlining cases,'" the attorney said, speaking under conditions of anonymity. "This is abandoning everything that we have done in the past. They are actively anti-civil rights. This didn't happen in Trump 1."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.