WASHINGTON — Consent decrees meant to hold police departments accountable for misconduct have been dismantled in several cities. Voting rights cases have been thrown out and replaced with investigations into alleged voter fraud. Civil rights laws have been used to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

The Justice Department under Attorney General Pam Bondi would be unrecognizable to its Reconstruction-era founders and to those in the present day who once worked inside the agency to protect Black, brown, and immigrant communities, former DOJ prosecutors said. 

Created in the aftermath of the Civil War, the DOJ was intended to unify the federal government’s legal work and to pursue justice against white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan that terrorized Black communities across the South. Yet, those early civil rights ambitions didn’t become a lasting part of the DOJ’s structure until 1957, when the Civil Rights Division was established to enforce federal civil rights laws more systematically.

In 2025, that division has been gutted, and it’s been “a sobering year” as priorities have changed, according to former DOJ prosecutors Shaylyn Cochran and Christy Lopez.

Cochran, deputy executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; Lopez, a Georgetown University law professor; and Jin Hee Lee, director of strategic initiatives at the Legal Defense Fund; help explain.

Capital B spoke to the three legal experts about how the Justice Department once served as a key defender of Black Americans and how, under the current administration, those protections are being steadily eroded.

How has the DOJ historically protected Black Americans? 

The Justice Department was founded in 1870. It was just five years after the last enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, learned in 1865 that slavery was outlawed with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. 

Since its inception, part of the agency’s role was investigating cases of white supremacy, but as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum in 1954 with the desegregation of public schools, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division was needed. Created in 1957, the team of prosecutors is one of eight criminal and lawsuit litigation divisions within the DOJ, including its antitrust, civil, environment and natural resources, national security and tax. 

“Priorities change, [and] it’s not unusual to see certain things emphasized in one era and deemphasized in another,” Cochran said.

There have been 87 attorneys general sworn in to lead the main DOJ over its history, and only two were Black — Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. However, under the Trump administration, there has also been a “complete erosion of federal career staff at the Justice Department,” she said. 

Thousands, including hundreds of prosecutors connected to the investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection, have been fired, while others have quit.

Cochran, a former Civil Rights Division prosecutor, said it’s no surprise that “elections have consequences,” which often include leadership and staffing changes — from the attorney general down through the Justice Department.

“It has been a sobering year,” she said. “It’s a sobering experience to compare the Justice Department of today, from what we were hoping it to be — what it felt like when I was there during the last administration.”

Lopez, a former senior official in the Civil Rights Division, said in an April interview that it “is the division that most directly addresses the interests and rights violations of Black people and other people of color.”

She served in the DOJ from 2010 to 2017.

The prosecutors within the division that once included Lopez and Cochran pursued voting rights enforcement and police reform, as well as combatted systemic discrimination in housing, education, and workplaces. Their work represented Black citizens when local elected officials refused to uphold their rights, especially in the Deep South. 

Lopez said that DOJ’s priorities — even when race is not explicitly mentioned — shape whose rights are protected. But these efforts were not automatic; they were won through public pressure, litigation, and activism. Public pressure from sustained Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd’s murder led to a robust federal policing reform package that has lingered in Congress since 2020. Litigation by civil rights attorneys like Ben Crump has led to police reforms in Louisville, Kentucky, and wrongful-death settlements for impacted families. And there has been grassroots organizing, such as Chris Smalls’ successful campaign to unionize Amazon’s first warehouse on Staten Island.

Lopez said that the protection of Black Americans extends beyond a single branch of the DOJ. 

“There are choices made in each of the divisions that will impact the extent to which each of those divisions protects the rights of Black people,” she reiterated.

The Environmental and Natural Resources Division is one example. In recent years, she said, it has worked to ensure that “Black and brown communities are not overlooked in everything from environmental cleanup to ensuring that people have clean water [and] clean air.”

How have new DOJ policies hurt civil rights? 

For former Civil Rights Division prosecutor Lopez, genuine protection of Black Americans requires “intentionality across every branch” of the Justice Department. But for Lee with the Legal Defense Fund, the DOJ’s Criminal Division “has historically not been a friend of the Black community,” which remains disproportionately harmed by the criminal justice system.

“The war on drugs and the use of the federal death penalty has historically been very harmful to the Black community, and those harms will obviously be kind of exacerbated under the current administration,” Lee said in an April interview.

Since Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential win, civil rights advocates say the DOJ has again been disarmed — its investigative tools, especially pattern-or-practice probes, have been curtailed or redirected to serve political goals. Under Bondi, the department has moved to terminate consent decrees in cities like Seattle, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Norfolk, Virginia — agreements that once held police accountable for discriminatory misconduct.

A pattern or practice investigation is typically launched after allegations of misconduct based on discriminatory factors within a law enforcement agency, educational institution, business, corporation, or entity have risen to a federal probe. 

Bondi’s DOJ also dissolved long-standing desegregation orders, including one with the Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, School Board, in place since the 1960s. The only remaining police investigation from former President Joe Biden’s era targets Rankin County, Mississippi, over the January 2023 assault of Michael C. Jenkins and Eddie T. Parker by six former officers.

Bondi has launched just one new pattern-or-practice probe, into the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, but focused narrowly on delays in concealed-carry permits rather than police killings, such as the 2024 shooting of Niani Finlayson by sheriff’s deputy Ty Shelton. Shelton has not been charged. 

That same department was found in 2013 to have a pattern of unreasonable force and racial harassment in Antelope Valley, prompting a federal consent decree that remains in place, but only partially enforced, the Los Angeles Times reported. 

Meanwhile, the DOJ’s Criminal Division has become a tool of political retribution. Federal grand juries have indicted former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James — both of whom previously investigated Trump. The division has also led prosecutions tied to aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and federal “takeovers” in targeted cities, where people are detained in facilities operated under the federal Bureau of Prisons, which critics say further criminalize communities of color rather than protect them. 

The BOP is part of the law enforcement arms of the Justice Department that includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration; U.S. Marshal Services; and ICE. 

How are civil rights organizations stepping up? 

Nonprofit legal organizations like Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Legal Defense Fund said they have stepped up to fill in the gaps left by the DOJ. Founded in 1963 after former President John F. Kennedy’s call for private lawyers to defend civil rights, the Lawyers’ Committee continues to act “regardless of whether we’re able to do that in partnership with the Justice Department,” Cochran said.

“Our mission is clear, not dependent upon what the Justice Department is doing,” Cochran said about the Lawyers’ Committee. “We are always happy to work with state and federal authorities, but we’re not going to wait to see what happens in the year and times ahead. We also do the same thing from a policy perspective and on an organizing front.” 

The Lawyers’ Committee has ongoing litigation on voting rights, criminal justice, and education — including challenges to Texas’ redistricting. 

Despite limited resources, the LDF are challenging Trump’s anti-equity orders and the executive order essentially eliminating the existence of transgender people in court, partnering with Lambda Legal and pro bono law firms to protect the right to engage in DEI efforts, she said. 

They’re also challenging some of the actions of the Department of Education that harm underserved Black and brown students, while fighting state-level laws that ban DEI, or discussions about systemic racism, Lee said.

“One of the things that’s so interesting and dangerous about what the current administration is doing,” said Lopez, who served as a deputy chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division, “is they are acting like if you remove all explicit references to race or gender … then the import of race and gender disappears, but it doesn’t. It just becomes invisible.” 

In her view, this invisibility risks “shifting the focus of the Department of Justice to protect people who are wealthy, to protect people who are white,” while leaving historically marginalized communities “under protected.”

Beyond litigation, Lee said the LDF is focused on “public education … to really explain to the public what exactly is happening,” countering misinformation that “instill[s] fear” and prevent people from pursuing equality-driven work.

“There’s just so much work to be done,” she said. 

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the origins of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The group was founded in 1963 after former President John F. Kennedy’s call for private lawyers to defend civil rights.