Trump's Ministry of Justice remove the leadership of the voting unit | Trump Administration

Donald Trump's appointments in the Ministry of Justice have removed all senior officials as a manager in the voting phase of the department and instructed lawyers to reject all active cases, according to the persons familiar with the matter, part of a broader attack on the department for civil rights of the department.

The movements come less than a month after Trump Ally Harmet Dhillon has been confirmed to lead the civil rights department founded in 1957 and to be described as the “Ministry of Cron Youth”. In an unusual step, Dhillon sent out new “mission statements” to the sections of the department, which made it clear that the department for civil rights shifted its focus from the protection of civil rights of marginalized people to support Trump's priorities.

Tamar Hagler, the head of the election department, which is responsible for the enforcement of the Federal Law to prevent discrimination against voters, and five top career administrators were assigned to the complaint office, a little-known part of the department with the complaint, which deals with the complaints that deals with the complaints of the employees. A career lawyer in the section was also revised to the complaint office.

The voting area had seven managers in January who monitor around 30 lawyers. One of the other two managers was retired and another detailed to work on a task force for anti -Semitism.

Political appointments have also instructed the career employees to relieve all active cases without meeting them and offering a reason – a significant break with the practices and norms of the department.

The Ministry of Justice has not returned a request for comments.

Together, the changes have triggered significant alarm about how the future of enforcing voting rights for the federal government will look at a moment in which the states continue to pursue restrictive voting measures.

It also raises concerns about future political interference. The Civil Rights Department of the Ministry of Justice has long resources and a credibility with which private plaintiffs cannot agree. And a large part of this reputation is due to the fact that the daily work of apolitical career staff whose work is supposed to be apolitical is carried out apolitically.

“The career managers have determined standards and standards and ensured that the section consistently spoke to one voice over time,” said a former employee of the Ministry of Justice. “This is destroyed by compensating for all career managers.”

The voting area dismissed its last active case on Monday – a contestation according to the law on voting rights, as the city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, chooses its city council. In March it also released a similar case in Houston County, Georgia. (Technically speaking, the department has a vote that is still active, but a judge held the case this week.)

The changes are part of a larger wave of about a dozen new allocations of high -ranking employees in the civil rights department this week. Several other components of the department, including the section Special Litigation, were also affected with considerable loss of personnel. The movements came a week before a period of April 28, so that the employees could decide whether a postponed cancellation offer should be accepted.

The re -assignment of the most experienced managers on low level tasks seems to be more open to crush morality. Clear management will not bring in any cases of enforcing civil rights and the lawyers will make the offer accept the department, say the department. Many lawyers from the department are expected to accept the offer.

“This is what you do if you don't really know what the section is doing and simply want to create chaos in the simplest way that you don't affect anything,” said a former lawyer of the electoral department. “It is extremely clear that the intention is to do absolutely nothing. And the effect will be that absolutely nothing is being done.”

Cleta Mitchell, an ally of Trump, who supported his efforts to overthrow the 2020 elections, demanded mass shots in the civil rights department. “Every lawyer in the voting department and probably in the civil rights department must be terminated. They do not support Pres -Trump or Maga. There must be a settlement. These are left -wing activists who should return and return from their left -wing organizations,” they wrote shortly after the election in one item on X.

The American Accountability Foundation, a dark group of money that created a “DEI observation list” by federal employees, sent a letter to the Attorney General Pam Bondi last year, who asked them to dismiss certain lawyers in the voting department.

The career manager is to be removed enormous episode in the Ministry of Justice. In addition to decades of experience, they act as a buffer between the political lawyers in the front office of a section and the non -political lawyers of their career. You check examinations and justification memos that argue to bring or not, and present the political representative.

You also take care of settings. While there is currently a hiring freezing, removing the career managers could pave the way for politicized attitudes and a “partisan and ideological capture” of an agency that should not be partisan, said a former department of the department.

“It is very possible to destroy the border between career and political employees, since the people who carry out the hiring process are usually the career manager. However, if they replace all career administrators and then have new political people, they could be filled very differently,” said the former employee of the department.

Since the beginning of the Trump administration, the Ministry of Justice has released major cases that question a comprehensive electoral law in Georgia and a major case in which the constituencies drawn in Texas were questioned. It has also dismissed cases in Virginia and Alabama who tried to prevent the states from being too aggressive to remove people from their voters.

Before the case was rejected in Texas, there was a superficial meeting between political appointments and career staff, in which, according to the former employee of the department, the political appointments had not bought the effort to read materials in advance. They rejected meetings to discuss layoffs since the person said, and the political representatives have not even bothered to learn the names of the career lawyers.

“Even if you do not believe that some claims should have been submitted, it is not plausible that every case in the funnel is no longer suitable by interpreting the rules,” said Justin Levitt, a former top official of the civil rights department during the Obama administration. “An instruction to fall a case without explanation, why only a decision is to enforce the law.”

“Leaving these cases without an explanation is simply arbitrary – and” arbitrary “is exactly what you do not want from the main agency of the country's prosecution,” he added.

In some cases, the management of the Ministry of Justice has publicly shaped the work of the career staff. On March 31, Bondi published a press release in which it was announced that she had instructed the department to dismiss his challenge for Georgia's electoral law, and said the bid administration “invented a story”. Chad Mizelle, the department head of the department, described the lawsuit as “shame”.

People who are familiar with the voting area emphasized that the administration's approach differs significantly from the way the section was operated during the first Trump office. Although the work of the coordination area slowed down significantly in the first term of the first term and in some major cases the positions changed, there was respect and collegiality for career employees. Eric Driband, who headed the civil rights department from 2018 to 2021, resigned to the US Capitol after the attack on January 6th.