“Presumptively illegal.”
That was the warning the Justice Department’s top civil rights official, Harmeet Dhillon, attached to her promise to investigate a water safety and lifeguard program in Eugene, Oregon—a verdict reached before any investigation had begun and without reference to a single person alleging discrimination. It came 12 hours after Libs of TikTok, a far-right social media account, posted a photo of a flyer for the program and tagged Dhillon. A post, a tag, and a foregone conclusion.
For decades, Department of Justice (DOJ) career attorneys like us developed federal civil rights cases from evidence. We gathered facts, analyzed the law, weighed risks, documented conclusions, and moved recommendations up the chain. That process left room for DOJ’s political leadership to set enforcement priorities in broad strokes, but it also emphasized accuracy and principled decision-making, and it helped keep federal civil rights enforcement independent of improper partisan influence. Even when a potential case lead, a tip, or a news story came to the attention of DOJ’s political leaders, they typically forwarded it to career staff with instructions to handle it “in the normal course.”
The current Trump administration has inverted that sequence. DOJ’s Civil Rights Division increasingly draws conclusions first and looks for facts later, if at all.
We trace how today’s conclusion-first enforcement works in practice, how the groundwork for this model was laid during the first Trump administration in 2020, and who ultimately bears the cost.
A Preview From the First Trump Administration
In the run-up to the 2020 election, DOJ’s politically appointed leadership directed a public announcement of inquiries into four states led by Democrats: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The allegation was grave. DOJ said in a press release that state policies governing nursing facility admissions during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic “may have resulted in the deaths of thousands of elderly nursing home residents.”
In response, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer pointed out that the relevant state policies were modeled on federal guidance, and that multiple Republican-led states had similar policies but faced no DOJ inquiries. DOJ Civil Rights Division alumni criticized the inquiries as “nakedly corrupt.”
Years later, the DOJ Office of the Inspector General assembled a record showing that these inquiries were pretextual, that the targets were chosen for political effect, and that the evidence did not drive the decision.
The press release announcing the nursing facility inquiries, according to a veteran DOJ public affairs officer, read as if the Civil Rights Division had been “working backwards” from a conclusion it had already reached. It was. DOJ political leadership had tasked career attorneys with justifying allegations made by two Republican members of Congress and amplified by the New York Post. When those career attorneys produced data supporting probes into two Republican-led states, Texas and Indiana, political leadership set the findings aside. DOJ barreled ahead with the public announcement, and, as the Office of the Inspector General’s report explained, did so “without knowing whether the ‘offending’ state orders were still in effect (they were not, having been rescinded or revised months earlier), whether such orders were consistent with federal guidance at the time (they were largely consistent with federal guidance), or whether other states had issued similar orders (they had).” One senior DOJ official involved in the 2020 effort revealed the political motive in writing, stating that a news leak related to additional inquiries in New York and New Jersey was “our last play on [the two Democratic governors] before [the] election but it’s a big one.”
This episode departed from DOJ’s longstanding policies and norms and illustrated the risk of misusing the Department’s significant authority for political ends. It also proved to be an early indicator of an approach that the second Trump administration would revisit and expand upon.
The New Approach: Conclusions in Search of Evidence
Under the current Trump administration, DOJ has accelerated and expanded this playbook. It now routinely announces investigations or even conclusions, sometimes within days or hours of a social media flare-up or public controversy, with little to no evidence of fact-finding.
Assistant Attorney General Dhillon makes no secret of the method. She reports scouring social media accounts for investigation ideas, calling the practice “fun and creative” and boasting that sometimes a single post “immediately puts a stop to” a civil rights “violation.”
The Eugene, Oregon, swimming program that Libs of TikTok flagged was a “BIPOC Water Safety and Lifeguard Cohort” that met twice a week. The program was started to address barriers to building water safety skills. As the federal government has documented and as the city has recognized, there are longstanding racial disparities in drowning rates. In response to Dhillon’s post declaring the program “presumptively illegal,” the city explained that no one is turned away or screened based on race and that the cohort supplements, rather than replaces, Eugene’s other water safety programming. Acknowledging racial disparities and inviting BIPOC youth to join a program does not, on its own, make that program discriminatory against white people.
In another example, a week after a Libs of TikTok post drew attention to an Illinois community college’s resources for undocumented immigrant students, Dhillon publicly warned that the college “will face the consequences at this @CivilRights Division!” She posted a letter concluding, without an investigation, that the college’s support for undocumented students, “on its face, appears to discriminate against . . . students based on their ‘national origin.’” But the Supreme Court has recognized that national origin discrimination is not interchangeable with discrimination based on citizenship or immigration status. Dhillon’s letter ignores that distinction.
The pattern repeated after a leaked memo describing a Minnesota hiring policy addressing underrepresentation of women and people of color in state employment was posted on social media. Dhillon responded the same day with a two-word verdict: “Not legal,” along with her signature threat, “FAFO” (shorthand for a profane version of “mess around and find out”). DOJ’s later lawsuit, United States v. Minnesota, shows almost no sign of an investigation behind it, relying instead on the policy’s text alone, without identified victims or evidence that the policy caused anyone harm.
Now-former DOJ attorneys assigned to high-priority matters during this administration have publicly disclosed that conclusions preceded investigation. “We were told what the outcome will be: ‘You have one month to find evidence to justify a lawsuit and draft a complaint,’” one attorney told ProPublica about a 2025 investigation into the University of California system. More recently, a whistleblower disclosure by a DOJ attorney assigned to work on Department of Health and Human Services civil rights investigations in 2025 related to Brown, Harvard, and Columbia described the outcomes of the investigations as “predetermined, without regard to the evidence” and said the “investigations, legal analysis, and findings were subordinate to political priorities rather than the enforcement of civil rights.”
Facing Federal Courts
Federal civil rights enforcement under the Trump administration has been dominated by inquiries and investigations that draw supporters’ likes and applause without facing close scrutiny. But the conclusion-first strategy has met a more exacting review in federal court, where the accusations and DOJ’s motives can be tested.
For instance, in United States v. City of Portland, Dhillon’s social media post helped unravel DOJ’s stated justifications for its aggressive actions toward the city’s police department. On Oct. 2, 2025, amid widespread U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations and corresponding protests, Portland police arrested right-wing commentator Nick Sortor outside an ICE facility. Dhillon reposted his social media account of the arrest, adding: “Portland: It’s FO time. Buckle up.” The very next day, DOJ invoked the city’s court-enforced settlement agreement, approved in 2014, over Portland police’s use of excessive force against people with mental illness to demand documents related to Sortor’s arrest and the city’s attempts to limit ICE’s use of a facility through zoning laws. DOJ’s letter strongly suggested that Portland had engaged in viewpoint discrimination that violated the First Amendment.
The timing here was telling. DOJ’s demand came as Portland police leaders supported Oregon and Portland’s lawsuit to block the deployment of the National Guard to the city. After scrutinizing DOJ’s motivation for demanding the documents, the court found that DOJ had acted “in bad faith and with unclean hands,” that its stated reasons were “pretext,” and that Dhillon’s post carried “all the hallmarks of a threat and attempted intimidation” made in response to the police leadership’s support for the National Guard litigation, rather than the “language [or] tone of a good faith investigation.”
The Cost of Substituting Political Theater for Civil Rights Enforcement
DOJ’s legitimacy was built on the expectation that allegations would be handled “in the normal course”—through impartial and rigorous investigation, principled legal analysis, and reasoned judgment. The Trump administration’s use of the Department as a rapid-response arm of partisan grievance politics has consequences.
Under aggressive federal pressure and escalating threats, institutions have preemptively curtailed programs, entered settlements, and seen a university president resign, all without a concluded investigation. Those concessions weaken protections for the communities federal civil rights laws were designed to serve.
And there’s another cost, borne by the targets themselves. They have to answer unsubstantiated and vague allegations. The ripple effects can be severe, whether or not the case ever gets to court.
Each taxpayer-funded hour spent by DOJ employees on scoring political points is also time stolen from people facing actual civil rights violations: communities confronting unlawful discrimination, voters denied equal access to the ballot, prisoners subjected to violence and abuse, people targeted by brutal hate crimes, and people seeking to access reproductive health services free from violence and intimidation.
DOJ must return to working forward from the facts, not backwards from a conclusion. Anything less is not civil rights enforcement—it’s political retribution that threatens the rule of law itself.
