The alert of changes in the Civil Rights Office in the Justice Department demands a “exit”

Hundreds of lawyers and other employees leave the Civil Rights Department of the Ministry of Justice, where the veterans of the office say that they have been expelled by Trump administration officials who want to drop its traditional work to follow up on issues against the ivy association, other schools and liberal cities.

The wave of departure was accelerated only in recent days, as the administration reopened the “deferred resignation program”, allowing employees to resign, but they are still paid for a period of time. The show ends, for those working in the section, on Monday. It is expected to take more than 100 lawyers, in addition to a group of previous departure, in what may reach the low ranks of a decisive part of the Ministry of Justice.

“Now, more than 100 lawyers have decided that they prefer not to do what they require their job, and I think this is a good thing,” said Haret Delon, the new head of the department, in an interview with conservative commentator Glen Beck during the weekend, welcoming rotation and taking the first priority of the department.

She said, “We do not want people in the federal government who feel it is a petition for persecution,” she said. “The job here is to impose federal civil rights laws, not ideology.”

Traditionally, the administration protects the constitutional rights of minority and marginalization societies, often by monitoring police departments due to civil rights violations, protecting the right to vote and combating housing discrimination.

Now, more than ten current and former lawyers in the Civil Rights Department say that the new administration appears to be determined not to adjust the direction of work, as it was typical during the changes from a democratic administration to Republican.

Lawyers said that the administration instead, as the administration, mainly expressed how the sectarian section has worked since its foundation during the Eisenhower administration, and it became an enforceable arm of President Trump’s work schedule against government and local officials, university officials and student demonstrators, among others.

It is a noticeable shift from the start of the Trump administration, when many lawyers in the department plans to stay, with the confidence that their work will be as it was in the first term Trump, with changing priorities but not wholesale changes.

Until recently, the Civil Rights Division did not face a kind of intense pressure from above that the other parts of the Ministry of Justice were to confront it in the early days of the administration. The General Integrity Department of the Criminal Division was one of the first to start receiving a warning from the ministry’s political leadership.

These demands were very rejected for the people who worked there so much that it became a division by name only, as its employees were reduced from about 20 lawyers to a handful.

When Mr. Trump took office in January, there were about 380 lawyers in the Civil Rights Department, according to current and previous officials of the Ministry of Justice. Based on unofficial estimates of the number of people planning to resign by the deadline on Monday, the section will be left soon with about 140 lawyers, or perhaps less. The numbers are almost similar to the non -local support staff in the department, according to current and former officials.

The departures also increased with the re -appointment of the political appointed in the department to the remaining employees of the remaining job in the department, leaving the two lines lawyers concerned that the responsibilities of their work quickly slip into a chaotic daily stampede that is not clear on any day of any day of whom their president will be.

Vanita Gupta, who managed the department during the Obama administration and held a senior official in the Ministry of Justice during the Biden administration, warned that the ongoing changes indicate a broader shift. She said: “This is not just a change in enforcement priorities – the partition has been operated on the head and is now used as a weapon against the same societies that have been created for protection,” she said.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice refused to comment.

Within the Civil Rights Division, it is common for some cases to be dropped, or to start some cases, with change in departments.

In itself, the current and previous Ministry of Justice officials say that these types of decisions are not particularly surprising. But the way the Prosecutor Bam Bondi and Mrs. Delon announced that such decisions have sparked many of those working there.

Not only the priorities that have changed, but the purpose of the same section, according to the current and former lawyers. They referred to a set of new task data that you introduced this month, which they say makes major parts of the department’s unknown work.

Stacy Young, who was once working in the department as a lawyer and is now the CEO of Justice Connection, an organization for former administration officials, has now a warning about the consequences.

She said: “With reckless dismantling in the department, we will see unwanted constitutional discrimination and violations in schools, housing, employment, voting and prisons by police stations and in many other worlds in our daily life.”

The agency’s political leaders say their mission is to end the “weapon” of the administration against the conservatives, end the “illegal” diversity, fairness and integration inside and outside the government. “DEI illegal”, the word “ton” for the Trump administration, is particularly confused for employees in the department whose jobs were long to ensure equal protection under the law.

Last week, Ms. Dhillon announced that the department was withdrawing the court files in two cases related to the inmates of the transgender prisoners. Looking at the current management position on this issue, it was expected that the withdrawals were expected. But when this step was announced, the senior Justice officials accused the agency itself of insulting the use of the legal system.

Ms. Delon said: “The arguments of the previous administration were on the cases of the sexually transformed prisoners on the unwanted science.” “The previous illogical reading of the law of Americans with disabilities was an insult to people who aim to protect the statute of protection.”

Weeks ago, Mrs. Bondi used a similar caustic language in saying that the administration would drop a lawsuit during the Biden era accused that the Georgia Law elections for 2021 were discriminatory. She said: “The Georgians deserve a safe elections, and not demanding the false voters that aim to divide us,” she said.

Matthew B. Ross, a professor at the University of North Eston, who often works as an expert witness in cases where the administration reaches approval decrees to repair local police stations, he heard from lawyers in the department he was working with.

Inside the department, there were discussions about the cancellation of long approval ceremonies with police departments and instead lifted cases against liberal cities to reduce their restrictions on weapons, according to persons familiar with the discussions.

Mr. Ross described the departure as a “collective exit”, which will have long -term consequences.

Mr. Ross said: “We move on to multiple steps back in terms of updating the law application in this country, which is completely unfortunate.” “Many of the work of the Civil Rights Department in fact is to obtain these police agencies to a modern standard,” even in simple targets such as replacing paper models with researchable computer data.

Looking at the number of people who leave the department, he said: “It is not clear how they will represent even the current approval ceremonies.”

The concerns of job employees within the department are not simply that many of their traditional work are abandoned. The current and former employees say that Mrs. Delon and other political appoinals in the administration have pushed the division to attempt the priorities of the Trump administration, which does not seem to line up with the current anti -discrimination laws or the precedent contracts surrounding these laws.

For example, a handful of civil rights lawyer was sent to the Ministry of Health and Humanitarian Services, with orders to investigate anti -Semitism that involve protests on the campus against Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip, according to persons familiar with the tasks that spoke about the lack of disclosure of their identity to describe internal employees.

Specifically, these investigations aim to focus on medical colleges, because the federal government can block large sums of the grants that it goes to. These people said that the Trump administration believes that money is a major form of leverage to dictate new criteria for campus behavior.

These persons said that another handful of lawyers was re -set in the Ministry of Justice to work on issues that involve anti -Semitism in universities, and it is important and it seems that it also focuses on investigating student protests and how university officials dealt with them.

Another group of civil rights lawyer has been appointed to work in cases for the declared goal of the Trump administration of protecting women in colleges and schools – a way in which the administration describes its efforts to prevent sexually transformed students from playing women’s sport.

In her interview with Mr. Beck, Mrs. Delon suggested that she had planned to quickly employ her to follow up on such cases.

Otherwise, she said, “We will run out of lawyers.”