A typically deranged February DOJ memo designating immigration enforcement as the department’s new priority begins with a little rhetorical flourish: “The Department of Justice is the only federal agency with a name that includes a moral imperative.” By now, we have all become so inured to the Trump administration’s talent for stripping meaning from words that this line almost doesn’t faze; it’d be corny to call it Orwellian. Though perhaps outrage at the manipulation of language feels impossible to summon because this is hardly the first time that the department’s title has seemed like a misnomer — or at the very least an oversimplification.

For those on the left who oppose the expansion of the carceral state and bemoan top-down encroachments on civil liberties, yet believe in the power of the federal government to defend civil rights, the DOJ has always presented a conundrum. The department, formally established during Reconstruction, was ostensibly tasked with ensuring equality under the law for black Americans as the KKK ran rampant and local law enforcement instigated racial terror. The DOJ’s inaugural attorney general, Amos Akerman, took advantage of Congress’s passage of the Enforcement Acts, three federal laws designed to protect civil rights, to secure critical prosecutions of Klan members. But after Akerman’s dismissal in 1871, his successor was instrumental in slowing those prosecutions, and later A.G.s did little to advance equality in much of the Jim Crow era. In the 1950s and ’60s, the department’s contradictions deepened. Even as its new civil rights division enforced landmark anti-segregation, fair housing, and voting legislation, its investigative arm, the FBI, hounded, surveilled, and killed black activists who fought for those gains. DOJ prosecutors were key foot soldiers during the war on drugs, helping to swell the federal prison population. Since 1980, the DOJ has had the formal authority to pursue legal action against prisons and jails to root out patterns of abuse, though these investigations are often halting and milquetoast. Meanwhile, the federal prison system, which also sits under the DOJ, remains rife with its own abuses — which the department is responsible for investigating.

We are so used to these complex dynamics that it can be difficult to grasp how thoroughly they are being reordered. The Trump administration has melted down the DOJ we once knew and used the raw material to forge a sleek machine with a unified purpose and total vision. Now helmed by former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, the department has been thoroughly marshalled in service of an ideological, demographic, and culture war that seeks to rebrand speech it dislikes as terrorism; purge the country of immigrants, especially those with brown skin and purportedly radical beliefs; and remake educational institutions — “the enemy,” as JD Vance has said — to curtail protest and restrict the honest teaching of history.

After its grandstanding preamble, the “moral imperative” memo directs U.S. attorneys to prosecute every criminal immigration violation they can, and declares the department’s intention to go after any state or local actors standing in its way. Trump’s DOJ — and though Bondi is nominally in charge, it really is Trump’s DOJ, with his adviser Stephen Miller helping to call the shots — has already sued New York and Illinois over their sanctuary policies. It appears that the department will do almost anything in pursuit of this goal, including taking extraordinary steps to let New York City Mayor Eric Adams off the hook, in pursuit of this goal; after Adams’s corruption case was dropped, he promptly agreed to let ICE into Rikers. (The New York City Council sued in response, and the order is currently on hold.)

One could be forgiven for assuming that such a Department of Justice would no longer have any use for its civil rights division. In fact, Trump has found in it a key weapon against universities and student protesters. The division, it was announced in February, will head up a federal task force whose central aim is to “root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.” Thus far, the task force has publicized visits to ten colleges that “have experienced anti-Semitic incidents” since October 2023; it has also announced a probe of the University of California system to determine whether it evinces a “pattern or practice” of anti-Semitism under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. On May 1, The New York Times revealed that a senior DOJ official ordered the division to investigate protesters at Columbia, asking for a list of names of students involved with pro-Palestine organizations to share with immigration agents. 

Helped on by a Democratic Party that has been all too eager to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, the administration has achieved a remarkable sleight of hand. If speech critical of Israel is inherently anti-Semitic, then protected First Amendment activity becomes discrimination — discrimination that is legally remediable with the precise tools crafted to ensure equality under the law for black Americans and other targeted groups. It’s a breathtakingly disingenuous and canny move that makes a mockery of civil rights law by using it to torpedo civil liberties.

As the department trains its focus on college kids chanting “from the river to the sea,” it will almost certainly fail to investigate jails, prisons, and law enforcement departments for civil rights violations, just like it failed to do the last time Trump was president. You might recognize the phrase “pattern or practice” from its most popular recent association: inquiries into police departments in the wake of major scandals like the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Back in January, the department circulated an internal memo freezing all activity on consent decrees, which are the federally enforced agreements that result from investigations like these and implement reform measures like enhanced training and the use of body cameras. As a result, Trump’s DOJ has jeopardized tentative accords in Minneapolis and Louisville that would have sought to root out unnecessary and racially determined uses of force. Meanwhile, the civil rights division is investigating Minneapolis’s Hennepin County Attorney, a reform prosecutor elected in the wake of the Floyd uprising, for “illegal consideration of race.”

Upheaval at the department this spring has led to the resignations of hundreds of staffers in the civil rights division. Seventy percent of its lawyers are now gone. In a recent interview with Glenn Beck, Harmeet Dhillon, an anti-DEI crusader who now heads the division, cheered the exodus: “We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute police departments.” This phrasing evokes the broader victimization narrative that so many cops mulishly cling to despite prodigious countervailing evidence. It’s one that this administration and its justice department have now thoroughly endorsed. The DOJ’s February memo articulates violence against police, but not violence carried out by them, as a threat. One of Trump’s latest executive orders speaks of “unleashing” law enforcement, providing “private-sector pro bono” representation for officers who have been criminally charged, and prosecuting state and local officials who try to rein in the cops. (Pity the Paul Weiss associate who thought he was going to make a difference in the world facilitating mergers and acquisitions and instead finds himself defending the next Derek Chauvin.) Taken in conjunction with the president’s early pardons of two D.C. cops who killed a young black man and then covered it up, this language suggests that law enforcement officers who brutalize protesters — and poor, black, and mentally ill people — will enjoy even greater immunity thanks to this administration.

As Bondi takes to Fox News to call student protesters “domestic terrorists,” Trump’s DOJ has also signaled that it will abandon the previous administration’s focus on right-wing extremism. Under Biden, the intelligence community acknowledged that domestic terrorists, primarily white supremacists, posed an elevated security threat, and the White House debuted a comprehensive strategy for combating right-wing radicalization; the new administration has scrubbed this plan from its website. Incredibly, even the counterterrorism machinery of the post-9/11 era is being rerouted: in March, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces were ordered to assist with immigration enforcement. Considering this development alongside the January 6 pardons, it is not entirely paranoid to see the Trump administration as tacitly encouraging groups that will advance its goals in the streets — including, it’s worth saying, plenty of people who truly do hate Jews.

The standard liberal gloss on Trump is that he represents a definitive break with everything that came before: process, standards, dignity. The challenge for the left is to make plain the incalculable harms the Trump administration has done without indulging in the same sort of gauzy fantasies of the past that have now twice buoyed the MAGA movement and its avatar to power. So the analogy that follows comes with caveats: it is intended neither as a valorization of previous departments’ meek attempts at police reform nor as an endorsement of the overreach that can accompany the department’s efforts to target even the most vile actors imaginable. But the wholesale abandonment of any pretense of accountability for the forces most likely to constrain and target black Americans undeniably subverts the department’s original and most noble purpose — a purpose it has never fully realized, but one that we can look at dead on and call justice, and still feel that the word holds some meaning. What’s happening now is like the Reconstruction-era Department of Justice abandoning its focus on the KKK and telling the southern sheriffs to keep up the good work.