The Perversion of Justice

It’s only been a week, and the Trump administration has already done plenty of damage. The Republican campaign and their allies in Project 2025 made no secret of their plan to sabotage and subvert the agencies of the federal government, but it’s still been a bit breathtaking to see the size and scope of the destruction.

There’s plenty to talk about, of course, but I’ll stay focused on the institution that I’ve spent the last few years researching and writing about — the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

Though it was a late addition to the department, created as a small section in the late 1930s and then elevated to a full division as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Division embodies the essential drive of a department that was originally created to protect and preserve the civil rights of Americans.

As my research on the CRD in the pivotal decade of the 1960s makes clear, the Division mattered quite a lot, but only due to the deliberate efforts of its dedicated leaders. Institutions are important, but the individuals who lead them are even more so. Under the direction of figures like Burke Marshall and John Doar, the Civil Rights Division helped focus the federal government on issues of voter suppression and racial discrimination to effect real change at the grassroots. The choices they made — on what they would litigate, on whom they would pressure and persuade, on how they would proceed — enlisted the authority and power of the federal government on the side of racial minorities who were seeking nothing less than their full rights as citizens.

But now a rather different administration is in charge, with a rather different set of priorities. Almost immediately, the president and his appointees targeted the recent wave of DEI programs set up in various federal agencies, framing their actions as a simple reversal of Biden-era excesses. But make no mistake — this administration seeks to roll back the clock of civil rights progress in much more fundamental ways.

The most drastic action (so far) has been Trump’s reversal of Executive Order 11246, which mandated non-discrimination policies for federal contractors and required them to take “affirmative action” to root out bias in employment decisions. LBJ issued it in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as a way of shoring up and expanding its prohibitions on job discrimination, and for sixty years now, it’s stood as a foundation of that approach. (While the original EO focused solely on race, “sex” was covered a few years later and then “sexual orientation” was added too a decade ago.)

Trump’s sudden strike at the executive order shows that the ambitions of his administration’s rollback on civil rights goes much beyond the recent talk about DEI programs to the core achievements of the civil rights movement itself.

A recent flurry of news items about the Civil Rights Division suggests that there is more to come. As the AP reported:

President Donald Trump’s new Justice Department leadership has put a freeze on civil rights litigation and suggested it may reconsider police reform agreements negotiated by the Biden administration, according to two memos obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.

Attorneys in the department’s Civil Rights Division were ordered not to file any new complaints, amicus briefs or other certain court papers “until further notice,” one of the memos said.

Another memo directed attorneys to notify leadership of any settlements or consent decrees — court-enforceable agreements to reform police agencies — that were finalized by the Biden administration within the last 90 days.

The Trump administration hasn’t just halted the current work of the Civil Rights Division and reached back to reverse its recent accomplishments as well. It’s also making the same kind of drastic decisions with the individuals who have served there. Two top officials — the appellate chief and her deputy — have been reassigned, apparently due to their past work championing transgender rights and prosecuting police brutality cases.

This fits a larger pattern in the Trump Department of Justice. In a fit of rage and retribution, Trump summarily fired over a dozen department lawyers who took part in the criminal prosecutions against him. Obviously, this was meant as an effort to intimidate the rest of the lawyers there.

Other officials, meanwhile, have been reassigned in an effort to shift priorities. The various section chiefs who handle environmental issues, for instance, have been transferred to roles related to enforcing the Trump policies on immigration, specifically its plans to retaliate against “sanctuary cities” that don’t submit to its demands. (Though this is an ominous move, history suggests it might not be that effective. During the 1960s, the CRD “borrowed” lawyers from other divisions to help on the ground and discovered they were, by temperament and training, a bit useless.)

Taken together, the redirection of the Department of Justice in general and the Civil Rights Division in particular should be incredibly alarming. The DOJ has long held itself as the defender of Americans’ civil rights and civil liberties and, while there have certainly been perversions of that promise in the past, the Trump White House sees the DOJ as a direct instrument of its will and an extension of its political agenda.

Under that kind of leadership and with the personnel punishments that I’ve outlined above, the Civil Rights Division could be used not to defend the rights of racial minorities, women, LGBTs, the disabled, etc. but to dismantle those same rights under the guise of “protecting” more dominant groups against any kind of “reverse discrimination” that robs them of their right to discriminate as they see fit.

The warnings that this all represents a return to segregation seem a bit overblown, but only just a bit.

We won’t see the reestablishment of state-sanctioned racial separation, but as I noted in my first book, when Jim Crow was originally dismantled in the 1960s those original segregationists found ways to keep their “way of life” alive through the abandonment of public spaces, a retreat to private ones, and an insistence that they had a right to be left alone. While the government and civil rights leaders successfully pressed the case for affirmative action, racial conservatives appropriated the logic and language of “colorblindness” to push back on that argument, to insist that government action against the racial status quo was unwarranted and unconstitutional.

But the Trump administration has stopped making that case for affirmative action in the private sector and has sidelined the Civil Rights Division’s important work in the public sector as well. This forced silence is incredibly troubling, but I find myself worrying more about what happens when the Trump administration starts using and abusing these vital institutions to make its case for a very different vision of America.

In the right hands, the DOJ and CRD have been powerful tools to protect and defend the rights of ordinary Americans. But in the wrong hands ….