Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon says about 300 attorneys quit the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division after President Trump’s team redirected the office toward eliminating DEI discrimination and cleaning voter rolls. The division had about 400 attorneys when Dhillon arrived.

Dhillon discussed the sweeping departure during an interview this week with Col. Kurt Schlichter, who was filling in on the Hugh Hewitt Show.

She described the Civil Rights Division as one of the largest operations at Main Justice in Washington.

The message from the new leadership was hardly complicated.

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The administration intended to implement Trump’s executive orders, including a push against DEI policies and a renewed effort to address problems with voter rolls.

Dhillon said her office was “prioritizing getting rid of DEI and cleaning up voter rolls,” after which “eventually about 300 of those attorneys quit, and so they self-deported.”

Rather than lamenting the exodus, she presented it as an opportunity to rebuild the division.

That rebuilding effort came with restrictions and financial limits.

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Dhillon said the division had to restore its staffing while operating under Justice Department rules and budget constraints.

“We then had the task of, while we had DOJ restrictions and budgetary constraints, building back the Civil Rights Division,” Dhillon said.

“And I’m really happy to say that I recruited over 100 great legal professionals here to the DOJ.”

WATCH:

The @CivilRights Division is dedicated to eradicating DEI, cleaning up voter rolls, prosecuting religious discrimination, and more. Join the fight @theJusticeDept here:https://t.co/XHFvdyi9VB pic.twitter.com/wNLvYl7Hwa

— AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) September 24, 2026

Dhillon previously told Tucker Carlson last year about the reaction among holdouts inside the division.

Employees held “crying sessions” and “unhappy hours” after Dhillon made clear that the office’s direction was changing.

According to the New York Post, Dhillon later said those attorneys “self-deported with a nice golden parachute from the government.”

She did not fire them, but instead informed them that the nature of the job had changed, and they chose to leave.

Bloomberg Law reported this month that more than 300 lawyers departed from a division that had more than 400 attorneys.

Those departures occurred during the past 19 months as Dhillon redirected the office toward voter roll enforcement, campus discrimination and religious liberty cases.

The departing attorneys were unwilling to approach race discrimination claims involving Asian students, white applicants, or other people excluded under DEI policies. It also criticized them for resisting work involving illegal voting and voter rolls containing dead registrants, movers, duplicate entries, and noncitizens.

Last December, a limited review covering 47.5 million records identified more than 260,000 dead people who remained on voter rolls.

That review also found thousands of noncitizens registered for federal elections.

In March, Dhillon said another review involving 50 to 60 million records had uncovered hundreds of thousands of ineligible registrations.

That total included more than 300,000 dead voters who were still listed.

The division has sued states that refused to provide requested data.

It has also warned election officials that knowingly leaving noncitizens on voter rolls can constitute a federal crime.

Dhillon told Schlichter that the rebuilt Civil Rights Division is now working as one unit.

Its priorities include combating race discrimination in hiring, helping states stop illegal voting, cleaning voter rolls and pursuing universities that receive federal money while engaging in discrimination.

The division is also targeting antisemitism on college campuses and prosecuting cases involving church blockades.

Dhillon specifically referenced the protesters in Minnesota who obstructed people attempting to attend church.

“We’re just really proud of the work that we’ve done here in the Civil Rights Division,” Dhillon said.

She cited findings letters issued against universities for ongoing discrimination following the Supreme Court’s fair admissions ruling, along with new categories of cases that the previous division would not have opened.

The personnel overhaul leaves Dhillon with more than 100 newly recruited legal professionals and a dramatically reshaped Civil Rights Division.

The lawyers who rejected the administration’s priorities made their choice, and Dhillon’s description of their departure delivered the final bit of bureaucratic snark: they “self-deported.”

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