Trump Recasts Mission of Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Office, Prompting ‘Exodus’

Hundreds of lawyers and other staff members are leaving the Justice Department’s civil rights division, as veterans of the office say they have been driven out by Trump administration officials who want to drop its traditional work to aggressively pursue cases against the Ivy League, other schools and liberal cities.

The wave of departures has only accelerated in recent days, as the administration reopened its “deferred resignation program,” which would allow employees to resign but continue to be paid for a period of time. The offer, for those who work in the division, expires on Monday. More than 100 lawyers are expected to take it, on top of a raft of earlier departures, in what would amount to a decimation of the ranks of a crucial part of the Justice Department.

“Now, over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do, and I think that’s fine,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the new head of the division, said in an interview with the conservative commentator Glenn Beck over the weekend, welcoming the turnover and making plain the division’s priorities.

“We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute” police departments, she said. “The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.”

Traditionally the department has protected the constitutional rights of minority communities and marginalized people, often by monitoring police departments for civil rights violations, protecting the right to vote and fighting housing discrimination.

Now, more than a dozen current and former civil rights division lawyers say, the new administration appears intent on not simply modifying the direction of the work, as has been typical during changeovers from a Democratic administration to a Republican one.