Civil Rights Group Probes Depleted DOJ Oversight of Local Police

The decimated workforce of the Justice Department’s civil rights arm has largely abandoned federal oversight of state and local law enforcement under the second Trump administration, a civil rights organization found.

DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which has lost about 75% of its career attorneys since President Donald Trump took office again, has fewer than 20 attorneys handling civil rights investigations into patterns or practices of constitutional violations by state and local law enforcement, according to the MacArthur Justice Center report, shared exclusively with Bloomberg Law. That’s down from more than 70 attorneys working on these types of cases at the end of 2024, the report said.

Tuesday marks one year since Trump issued an executive order directing then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to review all federal consent decrees and other settlements with state and local law enforcement agencies. Within a month, DOJ shut down most ongoing pattern-or-practice civil rights investigations, withdrew from proceedings to enter consent decrees, and dropped ongoing probes of police departments in Minneapolis, Memphis, and other major US cities.

Tuesday’s report, co-authored by a former DOJ attorney who worked on these investigations, details how even as federal agents have been scrutinized over their tactics in immigration enforcement surges in several cities, the Trump administration has depleted mechanisms for holding state and local law enforcement accountable in their policing and detention practices.

“It’s absolutely a travesty to have so diminished the federal piece of this,” said Helen Vera, an attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center who left her role in the Civil Rights Division’s special litigation section in September 2025.

“Unless there’s an ICE surge operation in your city, your state and local law enforcement is going to be more likely a bigger factor in your life,” Vera said in an interview, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The report adds to critiques from former DOJ lawyers and legal watchers of Civil Rights Division work that’s been deprioritized under the leadership of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. Dhillon, a former personal lawyer for Trump, has shifted the division’s focus to advance politically conservative priorities, including defending gun rights and investigating instances of alleged anti-Christian bias.

The Civil Rights Division, including the special litigation section, has for years held statutory authority to investigate and litigate against state and local police departments, prisons, youth detention centers, and other law enforcement institutions for actions or conditions that interfere with an individual’s constitutional rights.

Trump’s April 2025 executive order called for the administration to “establish best practices at the State and local level for cities to unleash high-impact local police forces.” Trump at the time criticized some local leaders who “demonize law enforcement and impose legal and political handcuffs that make aggressively enforcing the law impossible.”

The report’s authors call on state and local governments to fill in the void they say DOJ has left by dropping ongoing investigations into police departments. These include encouraging cities to adopt policies based on DOJ findings prior to the second Trump administration, such as for Memphis to prioritize improved use-of-force and de-escalation training, and for the Louisiana State Police to adopt accountability and data collection mechanisms to better identify instances of excessive use of force.

Vera said she believes some cities will continue to make good-faith efforts in adopting reforms, noting Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s June 2025 executive order committing to police reforms the city had negotiated with DOJ before the Trump administration moved to dismiss the proposed consent decree.

As DOJ dropped investigations and dismissed proposed consent decrees, the department has prioritized probes into the incarceration of transgender people at facilities that align with their gender identity. DOJ is also defending the administration in a lawsuit challenging the Bureau of Prisons’ attempt to move a group of transgender women from female correctional facilities to male facilities.