DOJ’s top civil rights prosecutors depart as office is cut out of key probes

At least five senior prosecutors in the criminal section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced their resignations this week, believing that the Trump administration has undermined the work and mission of the section, according to four people familiar with the personnel moves.

The office is the only part of the Civil Rights Division that handles criminal violations of the nation’s civil rights laws. For years, the Justice Department has relied on the section to prosecute major cases of alleged police brutality and hate crimes. The announcement of the resignations followed the administration’s highly unusual decision to not include the Civil Rights Division in the initial investigation of an immigration officer’s fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis.

The departures wipe the office of its most experienced prosecutors, including the section’s longtime section chief and deputy - Jim Felte and Paige Fitzgerald - career attorneys who served in their positions during President Donald Trump’s first administration and through President Joe Biden’s administration. Three other supervisors and senior litigators are also leaving.

Felte and Fitzgerald did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The department has been offering voluntary early retirement packages to certain sections, and some of the departing civil rights prosecutors qualified for that option. Some indicated to their colleagues before the Minnesota shooting that they were considering the retirement packages.

“Although we typically don’t comment on personnel matters, we can confirm that the Criminal Section Leadership gave notice to depart the Civil Rights Division and requested to participate in the Department of Justice’s Early Retirement Program well before the events in Minnesota. Any suggestion to the contrary is false,” a Justice Department official said in a statement.

The prosecutors informed their colleagues of their resignations Monday. People familiar with the section, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said the lawyers who are leaving did not attribute their decisions to the Minnesota investigation.

Trump’s appointees at the Justice Department pushed out and transferred many of the section heads and deputies in the Civil Rights Division in the early days of the administration. But the leadership of the criminal section was largely left intact.

For months, however, frustration has been growing within the section, according to people familiar with the division who said that further resignations are likely. Many lawyers in the office have said they feel the administration has prevented prosecutors from doing their work. The administration has repeatedly reversed positions on cases that the section has spent years litigating.

In July, for example, the Civil Rights Division told a judge that the Biden administration should not have prosecuted the Louisville police officer convicted in connection with a raid that resulted in Breonna Taylor’s death - and asked that the officer receive one day in jail. In November, the administration successfully pushed to dismiss a police brutality case in Tennessee, which was set to go to trial that month. The Civil Rights Division had been litigating that case for more than two years.

Within the Justice Department, the Civil Rights Division typically experiences the sharpest swings in priorities between Republican and Democratic administrations. But several former officials interviewed by The Washington Post described the shifts implemented so far under the Trump administration as more intense than anticipated.

In the first Trump administration, former Justice Department officials said, the division was largely left intact. The section did not pursue actions against police departments in the way that Democratic administrations had, but it prosecuted police brutality cases and continued to focus on prosecuting hate crimes, protecting disability rights and enforcing employment laws.

During the current administration, the division has dramatically changed its mission. A majority of its nearly 400 attorneys left in 2025 as a result. The head of the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, changed mission statements across the sections to focus less on racial discrimination and more on fighting diversity initiatives. The division has also aggressively pursued cases alleging antisemitism and anti-Christian bias.

After conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed at a public event at Utah Valley University, the Civil Rights Division launched a hate-crime probe. The investigation is examining whether hate-crime charges can be pursued against the suspect because of anti-Christian bias, according to a person familiar with the probe.

Prosecutors have also explored whether it would be possible to pursue hate-crime charges against the suspect, Tyler Robinson, if evidence shows motivation because of Kirk’s stance on transgender individuals - a move that would be a novel use of hate-crime laws. Robinson’s romantic partner was undergoing a gender transition at the time of the shooting, his mother told police.

Dhillon has said she welcomes people to leave if they do not agree with the new direction for the department. Dhillon told conservative podcaster Glenn Beck in April that she intended to send a new message to her staff.

“These are the president’s priorities,” Dhillon said on the podcast. “This is what we will be focusing on. Govern yourself accordingly.”

Dhillon has also said that her office is being flooded with applicants to fill vacant roles. But people familiar with the division said that just a fraction of the open roles have been filled, a process impeded by a lack of qualified candidates and bureaucratic delays. Some of the sections within the division are so understaffed that they cannot effectively complete their workloads.

“This exodus is a huge blow signaling the disrespect and sidelining of the finest and most experienced civil rights prosecutors,” said Vanita Gupta, the head of the division during the Obama administration and the associate attorney general during the Biden administration. “It means cases won’t be brought, unique expertise will be lost, and the top career attorneys who may be a backstop to some of the worst impulses of this administration will have left.”

The Civil Rights Division was established in 1957 as part of that year’s Civil Rights Act, which focused on fighting racial discrimination. Since its launch, the division has been tasked with upholding “the civil and constitutional rights of all persons in the United States, particularly some of the most vulnerable members of our society,” according to the Justice Department’s website.

The office has 12 sections that aim to combat discrimination in educational opportunities, housing, employment, voting and more.