The civil rights division of the DOJ has been undergoing changes under Trump and Harmeet Dhillon (assistant AG for civil rights at the DOJ), and the left hasn’t been happy (the article is from a few days after Trump’s inauguration):

Justin Levitt, deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division under Obama, expressed concern over Dhillon’s nomination, saying most of her casework has focused on “cultural grievance issues.”

Interesting way to trivialize it. More:

He argued that Dhillon largely hasn’t focused on the traditional mission of the Civil Rights Division, which was established by the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination against all people in the United States, with a focus on vulnerable groups.

See that shift? The Act bars discrimination against all people in the US. But it’s the left that gets to define what “vulnerable groups” are and therefore which ones deserve defending, and by their definition it’s not Christians or white people or women in sports.

Jesse Panuccio, former acting associate attorney general in the DOJ under Trump in his first term, said, “They are starting Day One to implement the agenda he campaigned on, and they expect career officials to faithfully execute those policy decisions.”

I doubt they expected it of all of them because so many were hired in order to implement the agenda of the left and have no intention of following the new administration’s guidelines. Some of those people may stay on as moles and saboteurs, but a great many are resigning.

Here’s how good old MSNBC, in the person of Ja’han Jones, has decided to cover it:

Rather than execute the Trump administration’s oppressive plans to weaponize the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division against political enemies, dozens of DOJ attorneys have chosen to walk off the job instead.

When MAGA lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, a key figure in Donald Trump’s bogus attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss, was nominated to lead the DOJ’s civil rights efforts, it seemed clear the division was poised to abandon — if not outright attack — the rights it has historically stood to protect.

Much more at the link.

Those of us with a long enough memory, however, recall that Obama had very much changed the focus of the division during his run as president, making it over to fit a leftist vision. Attorneys J. Christian Adams and Hans A. Von Spakovsky wrote about it here, in a series of pieces that much alarmed me at the time (starting in 2011):

In 2011, we produced the Every Single One series for PJ Media about an unprecedented wave of ideological hiring of leftist attorneys into the career ranks of the Justice Department. The series documented the partisan and radical background of every single one of the 113 new Justice Department lawyers hired into the Obama Civil Rights Division from January 2009 to January 2011.

With the help of PJ Media, we will now be updating that revealing report — and sharing details about the background of Justice Department attorneys hired since 2011. Because we have obtained all of the resumes of the attorney hires in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice since then.

And once again, every single one of them has an intensely ideological background…

When we are finished, you will see that the Obama Justice Department has assembled a law firm of hundreds of fringe leftists to enforce a brave new vision of civil rights law.

Why the Civil Rights Division? Simple — it may be one of the most powerful components of the entire federal government. If a president wanted to “fundamentally transform” the nation, he would likely start with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

The tentacles of the Division reach into virtually every crevice of American life.

And that’s exactly what happened. What’s occurring at present is an undoing of that trend. Some of the attorneys walking out were probably hired during the Obama years and some during the Biden years, but as Dhillon says, the resignations are “fine” with her.