When Harmeet Dhillon was picked to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division last year, civil rights groups worried what a lawyer who had fought against voting rights would do to the division that’s supposed to protect those rights and others. We’ve gotten an answer already. Dhillon was sworn in only a week ago, but she has already begun transforming the division from a defender of American’s rights into an enabler of their violation.
She has already begun transforming the division from a defender of American’s rights into an enabler of their violation.
Her office said Tuesday that it’s dismissing a case against the Mississippi Senate it filed on behalf of a Black female attorney who worked for the chamber’s Legislative Services Office. According to the complaint the Justice Department filed in November, Kristie Metcalfe, the first Black lawyer the office had hired in decades, consistently made “$40,000 to $60,000 less than its lowest-salaried white attorney (at times, paying her less than half of what it paid any of her other white colleagues) even though she and the white attorneys were doing the same jobs with the same levels of responsibility.”
The Justice Department gave no reason for dismissing Metcalfe’s case but had no qualms about revealing the awful reason it terminated a Biden-era environmental justice settlement on behalf of Black residents of Lowndes County, Alabama, who’d suffered the indignity of raw sewage flowing through their community. “The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,” Dillon wrote in a statement.
As The Washington Post wrote in 2023, an 18-month federal investigation found that those Black residents had “suffered inadequate access to sanitation systems, faced burdensome fines and liens, and had serious health risks plaguing their community ignored.” Even though those residents couldn’t stop the waste flowing freely through their community, they still faced criminal penalties for it.
When the settlement was reached in 2023, the Justice Department heralded its agreement with the Alabama Department of Public Health to address the long-standing deficiencies as “the first environmental justice settlement ever secured by the Justice Department under our civil rights laws.” Dhillon, in her statement that described the settlement as “DEI,” wrote, “President Trump made it clear: Americans deserve a government committed to serving every individual with dignity and respect, and to expending taxpayer resources in accordance with the national interest, not arbitrary criteria.”
The administration chose Dhillon to make sure those calls for help from America’s oppressed and downtrodden go unanswered.
Not only was Dhillon’s statement callous toward the Alabamians who suffered for years, but it also leaves us guessing about specifically what about the settlement was distorted through the lens of DEI. Is it DEI because, and only because, the people who would be helped by the settlement are Black? Even though the Justice Department presented the dismissal as correcting some grave error, Dhillon’s statement suggests that Trump believes that protecting marginalized groups isn’t part of “the national interest.”
The Justice Department’s shift in focus stretches beyond the Civil Rights Division. On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it would sue Maine’s Education Department for ignoring Trump’s efforts to ban trans athletes from girls’ sports. The Civil Rights Division’s remit doesn’t include suits brought under Title IX, like the one Attorney General Pam Bondi has opened. But the obscenity of the Justice Department’s making bullying children a top priority is only compounded when you consider the cases Dhillon has determined aren’t worth the Civil Rights Division’s time.
It’s likely that we’ll see more rollbacks soon. ProPublica reported Monday that the division’s crucial work on police reform remains halted with no clear sign of when it will resume. Voters who’ll face issues should the SAVE Act become law are unlikely to get relief from the office run by Dhillon. On top of that, the Civil Rights Division is set to shrink. The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Dhillon’s team had renewed the administration’s earlier offer for employees (aside from those in the Criminal Section and political appointees) to take a buyout.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the Civil Rights Division’s website still stated that it “works to uphold the civil and constitutional rights of all persons in the United States, particularly some of the most vulnerable members of our society.” That mission harks back to the earliest days of the Justice Department, which was founded during Reconstruction to provide federal relief to Black Americans facing ongoing discrimination. In days, Dhillon has turned that on its head. The administration chose her to make sure those calls for help from America’s oppressed and downtrodden go unanswered.
