DOJ Limits Civil Rights Unit as Ex-Staff Decry ‘Destruction’ (1)

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division will focus solely on “intentional discrimination” in its regulation of federally funded programs in the latest effort by the Trump administration to reorient the unit’s work.

The final rule, posted Tuesday on the 68th anniversary of the division’s creation, intends to make clear that DOJ’s Title VI civil rights regulations “do not prohibit conduct or activities that have a disparate impact,” and “will not pursue Title VI disparate-impact liability against its Federal-funding recipients,” the department said in its summary of the regulation. The update changes longtime DOJ regulations allowing the department to investigate policies that may appear neutral but disproportionately affect racial minorities and other protected classes.

It’s part of a broader policy overhaul in a year of personnel and enforcement upheaval for DOJ’s civil rights arm. More than 200 division employees who’ve left this year issued an open letter Tuesday blasting the administration for “destroying much of the Division’s work,” subverting its mission “in favor of President Trump’s political agenda,” and launching a “coordinated effort to drive us out.”

The new regulation follows President Donald Trump’s April executive order calling for the elimination of “the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible.”

“It is a sad commentary that in this anniversary of the Civil Rights Division, the Trump administration has chosen to eliminate a regulation that, for nearly 60 years has helped root out illegal race and national origin discrimination by recipients of federal funds,” said Christine Stoneman, one of the letter’s signatories. Until May she was chief of the section that enforced Title VI across federal agencies.

Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Civil Rights Division, said in a press release that “the prior ‘disparate impact’ regulations encouraged people to file lawsuits challenging racially neutral policies, without evidence of intentional discrimination.”

“Our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions,” Dhillon said.

Prior disparate impact regulations played a key role in several Joe Biden-era DOJ lawsuits and investigations that have since been withdrawn by the Trump administration, Regan Rush, former chief of the division’s special litigation section, said in an interview. This includes investigations and settlement agreements that addressed practices by police departments in Louisville, Ky., Minneapolis, and other cities that DOJ found disproportionately harmed communities of color.

The rule means “an important tool is now taken off the table” for DOJ’s enforcement involving “discrimination that is neutral on its face but has a disproportionate impact on communities of color” and other minorities, said Rush, who also signed the open letter.

To current and former division employees, the rule is exemplary of the recent changes that have led about 75% of DOJ’s career civil rights attorneys to leave in Trump’s second term.

Those who remain are strained in an understaffed office, said one current Civil Rights Division employee.

“Some of us are working long hours to try to keep matters moving forward, but even then many cases are left to stagnate,” said the employee, who spoke anonymously out of fear of retaliation. “We are working in an environment of hostility and disrespect from leadership, and of uncertainty where we never know who is going to be forced to stop their work or be terminated or transferred on any given day.”

DOJ spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre said in an email that the division “has been restored to its original mission of protecting the constitutional rights of all Americans.”

“To the extent that this new commitment to justice for ALL Americans disturbs former DOJ employees, that says much more about them than it does about the current DOJ leadership,” Baldassarre said.