President Donald Trump putting election denier Harmeet Dhillon in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division clearly meant that what’s been called the “crown jewel” of the department would be tarnished during this administration. Dhillon’s reported inability to recruit legal talent has only underscored the division’s sharp decline. The division’s weakening is particularly troubling ahead of the midterm elections, given the outsize role the Civil Rights Division has long played in preventing Election Day shenanigans.
As Republicans work overtime on different ways to suppress the vote, we ought to be able to count on the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to be a bulwark against such attempts. However, rather than give Americans comfort that the Civil Rights Division is there to make sure things run smoothly, the former Trump campaign lawyer has used her perch to spread uncertainty about U.S. elections. This summer, she sent letters to state election officials demanding they show how they’re complying with federal law on voter eligibility and threatening “potential criminal penalties” for those who “fail to carry out their duties” in preventing noncitizens from voting. Contrary to the Trump administration’s claims of rampant voting by noncitizens, only a negligible number of cases have emerged.
Rather than give Americans comfort that the Civil Rights Division is there to make sure things run smoothly, the former Trump campaign lawyer has used her perch to spread uncertainty about U.S. elections.
Her division led last year’s charge to force states to turn over their full voter rolls, which often include Social Security and drivers’ license data, to the federal government. Dhillon filed lawsuits attempting to force skeptical Democratic-led states to comply but has failed miserably in court, racking up a 0-23 record in the process. But her humiliating defeats could still provide plenty of bad-faith justification for questioning next month’s election results. And it’s not clear that her division has the personnel or the willingness to take Voting Rights Act violations seriously this Election Day.
The ongoing exodus of lawyers from the DOJ has hit the Civil Rights Division extra hard. The division has in the past typically employed around 380 lawyers. Dhillon, in an April 2025 interview with right-wing commentator Glenn Beck, said more than 100 attorneys had left, or as she spun it, they “decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do.” When she spoke at a Federalist Society conference a month later, she said the number of departures had swelled to 200 attorneys, and by that August, she said on a Breitbart News podcast that about 300 attorneys had left her division since her swearing in, roughly a 75% departure rate.
The New York Times reported this week that 130 lawyers have rushed in to fill the void and that some of the new hires have “education and work histories that might have disqualified them from being hired in the past” and others who have “left a trail of hyperpartisan, conspiratorial and, in some instances, bizarre statements” in their wake over the years.
Dhillon has a spin for that, too. “For years, the civil rights division recruited from a narrow pipeline of progressive activists and called it excellence,” she said in a statement to the Times. She insisted that the lawyers she has hired have “the experience this division needs to enforce civil rights laws for every American.”
The inability to find lawyers who want to work for the DOJ and meet its past standards has caused the whole department to hire people who’d have previously been rejected. A March 2026 memo allowed U.S. attorneys’ offices to hire lawyers straight out of law school, waiving the typical one-year minimum experience requirement. Many pro-MAGA lawyers that have been brought into the Criminal Division have floundered at some of the basics of their jobs. The Civil Division, which defends the government in court against lawsuits, offered a $25,000 signing bonus for lawyers “investigating youth transgender treatments and litigating the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.”
Dhillon’s difficulty finding lawyers seems to have clearly been exacerbated by the hard 180-degree turn the division has taken under her leadership. Rather than rightfully enforce antidiscrimination laws and protecting the rights of minority groups, Dhillon has focused on pursuing lawsuits against elite colleges and universities over alleged antisemitism and supporting white men she says have suffered from racism.
The influx of attorneys who are deep in the MAGA weeds or unqualified for their roles is deeply worrying ahead of next month’s election.
Regarding elections, Dhillon has already drawn concern with her heavy-handed deployment of election monitors. Last year, they were sent to keep watch over elections in New Jersey and California with no federal races on the ballot. In August, the Times reported that two DOJ monitors “tried to interview voters and examine voting machines at polling places during Wyoming’s primaries,” drawing a sharp rebuke from the state’s Republican governor. That same month, David Levin, one of the newly hired lawyers the Times named, and William Mohrman, another recent hire who worked on challenges to the 2020 election, were captured on video being reprimanded for getting too close to a polling place during Minnesota’s primaries.
Dhillon has said that she is merely fulfilling “a core function of government” in her handling of the division’s election portfolio. But the influx of attorneys who are deep in the MAGA weeds or unqualified for their roles is deeply worrying ahead of next month’s election. The people who are meant to be ensuring that every American can safely cast their vote are instead going to likely be either unconcerned about reported voter suppression or distracted chasing down fabricated allegations of voting by people who aren’t citizens.
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