- Led by California lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, the civil rights division has aggressively pursued California universities, prisons and law enforcement.
- Critics decry what they see as an ideological agenda, and the exodus of veteran attorneys.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Justice civil rights division was created in 1957 with an initial focus on combating racial inequality and protecting voting rights.
But in the first two years of President Trump’s second term, its mission has been reimagined.
Now, the division is focused on combating diversity initiatives, rolling back pro-transgender policies and rooting out allegations of election fraud.
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It had for decades investigated police departments for using excessive force. Now it investigates police departments with excessive delays in approving gun permits.
California has served as the division’s laboratory for all of these changes, or, as one former civil rights staffer put it, its “punching bag.”
The civil rights division has been involved in twice as many cases in California as in any other state, according to a Times analysis of cases brought by the Justice Department.
And an examination of press statements by the civil rights division shows that California has accounted for a higher proportion of actions in the second Trump administration than during the same time period in the Biden administration.
The division is led by Harmeet Dhillon, a Californian and a conservative legal crusader, who made her name bringing legal challenges against many of the state’s institutions and once served as the chair of the San Francisco Republican Party.
More recently, she was a leading legal figure in challenges to COVID-19 mandates and has shown steadfast support for Trump; her firm represented him in his successful 2024 fight to remain on the ballot in Colorado.
The Times spoke with a dozen former attorneys in the division, nearly all of whom said that the division has taken on a more partisan approach under Dhillon’s leadership and that the changes in the second Trump administration are far more dramatic than anything that occurred during Trump’s first term.
“It is an ideological civil rights division in a way that we’ve never seen before,” said Regan Rush, the former chief of the division’s special litigation section, which largely focused on investigations into police departments and prisons.
Rush is now director of the Red Line for Civil Rights at Democracy Forward, a nonprofit group that tracks the division’s activities.
In response to questions from The Times, Dhillon wrote that the division’s actions aren’t political.
“This Department speaks plainly and directly when we identify violations of federal law. Being clear about violations of federal civil rights law isn’t political or combative — it’s transparent,” Dhillon said. “I stand behind the work we’ve done since I took over the Civil Rights Division.”
While California produced President Reagan — a hero on the right who as governor frequently sparred with UC Berkeley, as Dillon does today — the state has now become, in conservative circles, a symbol of everything wrong in America.
“If there’s any state that is the antithesis of the Trump administration, it’s California,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Berkeley.
