‘Complete 180’: How the DOJ has redefined its civil rights mission and targeted California

WASHINGTON— The civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice was established in 1957, initially focusing on combating racial inequality and protecting voting rights.

But in the first two years of President Trump’s second term, its mission was reimagined.

Currently, the department is focused on combating diversity initiatives, rolling back pro-transgender policies, and rooting out claims of election fraud.

For decades, he had been investigating police departments for using excessive force. He is now investigating police departments that are experiencing excessive delays in approving gun permits.

California served as the department’s laboratory, or “punching bag,” as one former civil rights worker put it, for all these changes.

In California, the civil rights division was involved in twice as many cases as in other states, according to a Times analysis of cases brought by the Justice Department.

And a review Civil rights department press releases It shows that California was responsible for a higher proportion of actions under the second Trump administration than under the Biden administration during the same period.

The division is led by Harmeet Dhillon, a conservative California advocate who made her name challenging legal challenges against many of the state’s agencies and once served as chair of the San Francisco Republican Party.

More recently, he was one of the leading legal figures in the fight against the mandates of COVID-19 and has shown staunch support for Trump; his firm represented it in his successful 2024 bid to stay on the ballot in Colorado.

The Times spoke with a dozen former lawyers in the department; Nearly all of them said the department had taken a more partisan approach under Dhillon’s leadership, and that the changes in the second Trump administration were far more dramatic than those that occurred during Trump’s first term.

“This is an ideological civil rights division we’ve never seen before,” said Regan Rush, former chief of the department’s special litigation division, which focuses largely on investigations of police departments and prisons.

Rush is now the director Red Line for Civil Rights at Democracy Forward, a nonprofit group that tracks the department’s activities.

Responding to questions from The Times, Dhillon wrote that the department’s actions were not political.

“This Department speaks openly and directly when we identify violations of federal law. Being open about violations of federal civil rights law is transparent, not political or combative,” Dhillon said. “I stand behind the work we have done since taking over the Civil Rights Division.”

While California produced President Reagan, a right-wing hero who as governor frequently quarreled with UC Berkeley, as Dillon does today, the state has now become a symbol in conservative circles of everything that is wrong with America.

“If there is one state that is the antithesis of the Trump administration, it is California,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley law school.

Dhillon said the department will file charges wherever it sees violations of federal law.

“As our enforcement actions demonstrate, California is where some of the most significant violations of federal civil rights law occur,” he said.

Former attorneys in the department said the desire to target California was clear to them.

As one example, the department announced more than a dozen actions involving universities in California; these have largely focused on allegations of antisemitism on University of California campuses (the subject of an earlier executive order by Trump) and allegations of racial bias in hiring within the UC system and in the admissions practices of various medical schools in the state.

The department concluded that medical schools at UC Davis and UCLA racially discriminated against white and Asian applicants and that UCLA did not adequately respond to complaints of antisemitic harassment against Jewish and Israeli students. Other investigations are ongoing.

“We were never explicitly told that California institutions were taking particular interest, but it was a very easy thing to notice,” said Ejaz Baluch, a former Justice Department attorney who worked on the employment litigation team investigating allegations that anti-Semitism on UC campuses created a hostile work environment.

Trump’s priorities

Dhillon he told podcast host Michael Malice. He said in May that he was in “constant contact” with the White House “daily, sometimes several times a day.”

His predecessor, Kristen Clarke, who was the deputy attorney general who oversaw the department during the Biden administration, said this represents a major shift from how the department had previously operated.

“There was a pretty solid and necessary wall between the Justice Department and the White House,” Clarke said. “That’s a complete 180.”

Dhillon said he sees his job as enforcing civil rights law from Trump’s perspective. administrative ordersTargeting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, immigration and pro-transgender policies, among other conservative priorities.

He said that although the department “operates within the administration’s law enforcement priorities … investigative and prosecutorial decisions, including what matters to pursue and how, are made by the Department based on the law and the facts.”

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said the department’s changes under Dhillon represent a sharp shift from how it operated in the past.

“It has now become more of an anti-civil rights department,” Schiff said. “We live in an upside-down world where departments set up for a single purpose act contrary to the purpose of the department.”

Dhillon said that under his leadership, the department “impartially enforces federal civil rights laws on behalf of all Americans.”

“This includes protecting religious freedom, Second Amendment rights, and spaces for women and girls, standing against illegal race-based policymaking and DEI, and defending the fundamental rights of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”

According to Dhillon, the reorientation of the department led to a mass exodus of career staff; that was nearly three-quarters of the nearly 400 lawyers there at the beginning of 2025.

That means far more departures than during the first Trump administration.

“I said, ‘My way or the highway,’ and my way is not my way, it’s President Trump’s way,” Dhillon told Malice.

Dhillon told The Times that the department has added 100 new attorneys and staff in the past 15 months and plans to hire 100 more.

Prisons and police

The department closed some cases filed during previous administrations as it shifted its focus to align with the priorities laid out in Trump’s executive orders.

Former attorneys in the department worry that other pre-existing cases are weakening.

episode in march opened an investigation against two women’s prisons in California — the California Institute for Women in Chino and the Central California Facility for Women in Chowchilla, 35 miles northwest of Fresno — over whether the facilities violated the rights of other female inmates by housing transgender women.

“There are allegations of sexual assault, rape, voyeurism, and a pervasive climate of sexual fear due to the presence of men in the women’s prison,” the Justice Department said in announcing the investigation into misgendering transgender inmates.

Former attorneys at the department said leadership also tried to launch an investigation into the impact of transgender housing policies on juvenile institutions in California but did not find enough evidence to warrant an investigation.

Investigation into transgender inmates in women’s prisons preliminary investigation Although evidence supports the allegations, cases remain unsolved at the same two prisons after hundreds of women reported being sexually abused by guards.

Separate from the civil rights investigation, a former guard at the Chowchilla facility was convicted in January 2025 of more than 60 counts of sexual abuse of inmates. Sentenced to 224 years in prison in prison.

“We haven’t seen any relief,” said Megan Marks, former deputy chief of the department’s private litigation division and deputy director and editor-in-chief of Democracy Forward’s Red Line for Civil Rights.

Dhillon said both investigations into the two women’s prisons were “continuing vigorously and simultaneously”.

For the past three decades, the division has been investigating allegations of police misconduct; This authority was granted by Congress following the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department officers.

But in the second Trump administration, the department closed a number of active police investigations and moved away from what Dhillon described, according to Malice, as “a standing order to persecute police departments and impose absurd restrictions on them.”

Instead, the department filed lawsuits against law enforcement agencies deemed to have failed to protect the rights of gun owners.

California was the first target.

The department filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit in September 2025, alleging that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department systematically denied people their 2nd Amendment rights due to long delays in approving concealed carry permits.

A second gun rights lawsuit was filed in California last month, this time against the state and the Advocate. Gen. Rob Bonta served as U.S. attorney for the state’s ban on Glock handguns. Gen. Todd Blanche called it “a blatant violation of our rights by the California government.”

change tone

Former lawyers in the civil rights division say the combative tone in press releases announcing the lawsuit challenging the Glock ban and in scores of social media posts announcing Dhillon’s intention to launch an investigation represents a major shift from how the department has operated in the past.

“What stands out more than other civil rights departments is how much they demonize and personalize,” said Christy Lopez, a former attorney in the department who is now a professor at Georgetown Law School. “We tried to establish a connection with the judiciary”

Dhillon defended the approach he and the department took.

“Our job is to enforce the law and ensure compliance,” Dhillon said. “This includes public messaging to ensure the public is both aware of what the law requires and knows when others are breaking the law. We designed our messaging strategy with this goal in mind, and we are pleased with the impact it has had.”

Many former lawyers in the department also said that the current administration put its finger on the scales at the beginning of the investigations.

“We were basically given a response before we conducted an investigation, which is completely contrary to how these investigations should be conducted,” said a former Justice Department attorney who worked on the investigation into allegations of antisemitism in the UC system, asking to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

Lawyers visited UC Berkeley and UC Davis but found enough evidence only at UCLA to file a lawsuit against claims that antisemitism created a hostile work environment.

One of Dhillon’s first top aides is the former Huntington Beach City Attorney. Michael Gates denied that politics played a role in decision-making during his tenure at the department.

“We evaluated each case individually,” he said. “There was nothing about politics that affected them.”

Gates, who left the department in November, is now the Republican candidate challenging Bonta for state attorney general.

Dhillon told The Times he was “proud of the record we’ve built” and believed the department was “active and effective”.

But its former leaders worry that it has lost the ability to fulfill its mission because of the exodus of lawyers and the changing nature of the department’s approach.

“What part of your episode is leaving today?” said his former leader, Clarke. “This is a broken institution that cannot adequately stand up and defend the civil rights of all Americans.”