This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
The Justice Department is having a hard time.
Since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, the Justice Department—and in particular their Civil Rights Division—has been, in essence, hemorrhaging attorneys. Now, per Bloomberg Law, the Justice Department is advertising some very tantalizing $25,000 signing bonuses for any lawyer willing to join in on the Trump administration’s crusade against transgender Americans, undocumented immigrants, and… well… probably just anybody who doesn’t like Donald Trump.
In February of last year, when Harmeet Dhillon was announced as the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, mass resignations and reassignments followed almost immediately. Dhillon made it clear from the start that the Civil Rights Division would be exclusively pursuing Donald Trump’s agenda, which was focused almost entirely on prosecuting his political enemies and torturing marginalized Americans, in particular trans people.
As the Civil Rights Division transformed into a tool for Donald Trump to harm his political adversaries and undesirables, more than 70% of their attorneys resigned, a fact which would alarm any normal person… but which Harmeet Dhillon delighted in. At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington last year, she told a crowd of onlookers, “Those who were left behind or had tendered their resignation but hadn’t left, began hosting ‘unhappy hours’. There were collective work crying sessions. They made their displeasure known, but ultimately, they left. So thank you to all of those people who left. I thank them as a taxpayer, because they weren’t willing to do the job.”
On December 9, the 68th anniversary of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, former employees collectively signed a letter decrying the gutting of the division and its heinous new purpose. Less than a week later, yet more attorneys would leave the division as the Trump administration directed them to harass pro-Palestine college students. In January, after the extrajudicial murder of Renée Good during ICE’s domestic terrorism campaign in Minneapolis, the Justice Department announced that they would not be pursuing an investigation into Good’s killer.
More resignations followed. So many, in fact, that federal prosecutors are finding it nearly impossible to do their jobs. Just this week, the fed at last turned over evidence in Renée Good’s murder case to a Minnesota district court, though whether or not that actually means anything remains to be seen.
Not long after, a federal attorney working on ICE’s behalf in Minnesota, Julie Le, had a breakdown in open court during which she bemoaned how miserable her job was and asked a federal judge to hold her in contempt of court so that she could get some rest. She was unsurprisingly reassigned, and is inexplicably now planning to run for Congress… against Ilhan Omar… one of the most beloved congressional representatives in America (and my representative!), who is planning to seek reelection.
Good luck with that, Julie.
All of these disasters and setbacks are, for career attorneys, unbelievably heartbreaking. In years past, spending a few years as an underpaid, overworked lawyer for the Justice Department was considered a prestigious career move. Now, the Justice Department has to offer significant cash bribes to attract new lawyers, as so many seasoned prosecutors have abandoned that sinking ship that the federal government is struggling to exist effectively in a court of law.
But is this, in some ways, for the best? A weakened Justice Department means Trump has a harder time carrying out malicious prosecution. At a time when our community is under nonstop attack from the federal government, a lack of competency among our prosecutorial enemies might just give us some breathing room. Of course, the already terminally slow wheels of justice only move slower every day, where federal law is concerned.
How will this all shake out? I have no idea! I’m not a lawyer or a legal expert of any kind. I can only express my sincerest wishes that, after the Trump administration comes crashing down for a (hopefully) final time, Harmeet Dhillon never works another day in her life, is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for her role in obliterating the Civil Rights Division, and ends up impoverished and miserable.
Fingers crossed!
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
