Civil Rights Organizations Demand Congressional Leaders Hold DOJ Accountable for Abandonment of Civil Rights Enforcement

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Patrick McNeil, [email protected] 

WASHINGTON — The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and more than 80 organizations wrote to congressional leaders today demanding they exercise their oversight responsibility and engage in robust oversight of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, including through investigations and hearings and by all other means at their disposal. The letter calls out the “shocking perversion of the founding mission of the Civil Rights Division” and comes as the division, now led by the president’s former personal lawyer, has seen the dismissal and reassigning of attorneys and has abandoned its existing civil rights docket.

“In a reversal of historic proportion, the Civil Rights Division is upending civil rights enforcement principles and practices — which have been in place since its inception in 1957 — in favor of promoting a virulent, discriminatory agenda directly traceable to the president that targets the very communities Congress intended to protect by passing civil rights laws,” the letter states. “This represents a complete distortion of the division’s founding mandate and will do irreparable harm to the cause of civil rights in this country for decades to come.”

Political leaders at the Civil Rights Division have overseen:

• An abandonment of its civil rights mission. Shortly after she assumed her position, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon sent new mission statements to the division’s 11 sections. Instead of focusing on voting discrimination against racial, ethnic, and language minorities and people with disabilities, the division will now focus on using federal resources to pursue the negligible problem of voting fraud. Dhillon told the educational opportunities section that “The zealous and faithful pursuit of this section’s mission requires the full dedication of this section’s resources, attention and energy to the priorities of the president.”
• A significant loss of civil rights leadership and expertise. Estimates indicate that more than 250 attorneys in the division have resigned, accepted a deferred resignation offer, or have been reassigned elsewhere within DOJ — reflecting a breathtaking reduction in attorney staff of 70 percent.
• The decimation of the civil rights docket. Political leaders have gutted its enforcement docket through sweeping directives or the withdrawal of seminal cases across issue areas. For example, the few remaining attorneys in the voting section were reportedly directed to dismiss all active voting rights cases, withdrawing from important voting lawsuits. The division has halted longstanding efforts to address systemic civil rights violations in policing and announced the closure of investigations into unconstitutional policing across the country, and it withdrew from a decades-old desegregation consent decree in Louisiana. Additional examples are included in the letter.

The letter, which says that this administration “has sunk to a new low by jettisoning longstanding civil rights enforcement principles in favor of strict adherence to President Trump’s extremist and illegal executive orders,” underscores the ways in which the DOJ has surrendered its independence and made itself servile to the president’s vendettas and anti-civil rights agenda. As noted in the letter, “The intense focus on implementing President Trump’s spiteful, white nationalist agenda is an alarming departure from the Civil Rights Division’s congressional mandate to enforce civil rights laws.”

The signers of the letter call on congressional leaders to exercise their full authority under the U.S. Constitution to conduct immediate and robust oversight of the division through initiating investigations, holding oversight hearings, and using all other means at their disposal. “The civil rights of every single American are at stake,” the letter concludes.

The full letter is available online here.

Background

• Since our coalition’s founding 75 years ago, The Leadership Conference has coordinated the advocacy efforts on behalf of every major civil rights law since the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which created the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and the role of assistant attorney general for civil rights.
• In recent months, The Leadership Conference strongly opposed confirmation of both Pam Bondi and Harmeet Dhillon to serve as attorney general and assistant attorney general for civil rights, respectively, because of their anti-civil rights records and unflinching loyalty to the president.
• Earlier this year, The Leadership Conference released a brief — “Rights and Reversals: The Shifting Course of DOJ’s Federal Civil Rights Enforcement” — detailing the history of the division, the importance of strong leadership, and the recent whiplash in federal civil rights enforcement.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights is a coalition charged by its diverse membership of more than 240 national organizations to promote and protect the rights of all persons in the United States. The Leadership Conference works toward an America as good as its ideals. For more information on The Leadership Conference and its member organizations, visit www.civilrights.org.

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