Inside Trump’s ominous plan to turn civil rights law against vulnerable Americans

In 2016, Christy Lopez was living her dream. She was an attorney at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division working on policing where, among other things, she led the team that investigated the Ferguson Police Department after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown. Lopez believes that her work spurred meaningful policing reforms, both in Ferguson and nationwide.

But when Donald Trump won the 2016 election, Lopez quit. Trump, she thought, would block her team from doing any kind of worthwhile investigation into police use of force. Lopez was right. In Trump’s first year in office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sharply restricted the use of consent decrees — the legal tool Lopez and her colleagues used to force change in Ferguson.

Today, she is sounding the alarm: Whatever the dangers of a first Trump term were, the risks of a second dwarf them.

“If Trump is elected, I would like to look back five years from now and say, ‘Oh, we were really alarmist,’” Lopez, now a law professor at Georgetown, told me.

“But I do worry that it’s actually going to be far worse.”

Many, many people have warned that Trump is a threat to American democracy. Many others have argued that these warnings are politically inert, that focusing on abstract concepts like “democracy” and “the rule of law” removes political debate from the concrete concerns people want addressed by government. Do people struggling to pay the bills have time to care about such matters of principle?

Yet in reality, the two things are inseparable. Trump’s plan to turn the government into a tool of his own personal will would have extraordinary consequences for Americans’ everyday lives. It would disrupt, or potentially even devastate, core functions of government that we’ve long taken for granted.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is a case in point.

Founded by the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the Division is tasked with enforcing federal law regarding anti-discrimination and civil equality. This is a mammoth responsibility, covering areas of law that shape the fundamental experience of American democracy. Its attorneys launch hate crimes prosecutions, investigate discrimination in employment and housing, and sue states when their voting rules run afoul of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Were Trump to return to power, the department could easily be turned from a tool for protecting civil rights into a means of undoing them. Trump and his allies have laid out fairly specific plans for doing just that — plans that, if enacted, would mean a far more radical and methodical transformation of the federal rights civil apparatus than what we saw in Trump’s shambolic first term.

The department’s Voting Section — which played a critical role in defending the integrity of the 2020 election — would be twisted, its attorneys replaced with cronies working to validate Trump’s lies and shield Republican-controlled states from federal scrutiny. Its anti-discrimination litigators would be tasked with investigating “anti-white” discrimination, effectively turning the Civil Rights Act on the minority citizens it was written to defend. And Lopez’s former colleagues working on policing would not only let abusive cops skate, but potentially even investigate local law enforcement Trump believed weren’t aggressive enough toward alleged criminals.

We can see here that a second Trump administration would likely mean the inversion of the traditional purpose of federal civil rights law. Its guardrails against authoritarianism, discrimination, and abuse of power will be twisted toward advancing them.

And it’s just one of many ways in which Trump’s pursuit of power at any cost would have tangible and direct consequences for ordinary Americans’ lives.

Trump’s plan to invert the Civil Rights Division, explained

Donald Trump has vowed to use a second term to enact “retribution” against his enemies.  The Justice Department, and specifically the current Civil Rights Division staff, are at the very top of the list. 

At the end of Trump’s first term, he issued an executive order creating a new classification for civil service jobs — called Schedule F — that would have allowed him to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with handpicked allies.

While Trump left office before his team could implement Schedule F, Trump has promised to re-issue the order “immediately” upon returning to office. In anticipation, his allies have compiled long lists of civil servants they’d like to fire and loyalists they’d like to put in their place — preparations that have led one expert on federal administration to conclude that 50,000 firings is now “probably a floor rather than a ceiling.”

Trump’s allies have focused on the Civil Rights Division as one of their chief targets for Schedule F and other power grabs. Project 2025 — widely seen as the chief planning document for a Trump second term despite the campaign’s disavowals — has an explicit, detailed plan for taking it over. 

The document calls on the next Republican president to “reorganize and refocus” the division, aiming to make it into “the vanguard” of the administration’s crusade against “an unholy alliance of special interests, radicals in government, and the far Left.” It is one of three DOJ divisions singled out in the document’s call for “a vast expansion of the number of [political] appointees” overseeing and directing its conduct. 

This is all part of a broader plan for eroding the Justice Department’s traditional independence. While the attorney general is appointed by the president, their staff is given wide leeway to follow the law rather than the president’s dictates. Political personnel are strictly prohibited from interfering with specific investigations and cases. That’s why the current Justice Department could pursue a case against Hunter Biden with no fear of retaliation from his father.

Trump and top deputies have declared their intent to change this.

“The notion of an independent agency — whether that’s a flat-out independent agency like the FCC or an agency that has parts of it that view itself as independent, like the Department of Justice — we’re planting a flag and saying we reject that notion completely,” Russ Vought, a key second-term Trump planner, said in a 2023 interview.

When you put these three proposals together — seeding the Civil Rights Division with Trump political appointees, using Schedule F to replace career prosecutors with ideological allies, and ending department independence — the full picture becomes clear. If Trump has his way, a second term means a Civil Rights Division operating not as a (relatively) neutral division dedicated to enforcing civil rights law, but as a tool of the Trump agenda in all the areas it covers.

This is very threatening for government employees and obviously offensive to the notion of a neutral civil service. But what would this mean for most Americans in practice? What does it matter, really, if one bureaucrat is swapped out for another?

Election law politicized

On November 9, 2020, Attorney General Bill Barr directed the Justice Department to investigate President Donald Trump’s allegations of fraud in the just-concluded presidential election. 

The probe, announced after the election had been called for Joe Biden, was controversial inside the Department. It raised fears that Barr, no stranger to conspiracy theories about voter fraud, was trying to validate Trump’s claims of a stolen election. 

Yet the professional probe, staffed by veteran investigators in the Civil Rights Division and elsewhere, found no evidence of mass fraud. On November 23, Barr told Trump the investigation was “not panning out.” The neutral, competent investigation gave the attorney general the ammunition he needed to stand up to the president.

Now imagine if things were different, if these career investigators had been Schedule F’d out, replaced instead with Trump-aligned attorneys. 

What if they had come to Barr and said that, actually, the bogus statistical arguments that the election was stolen had merit? What would he have done then? How would reports of such findings, however bogus, influence the rest of the country — including Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress?

It’s an example that illustrates just how important the Civil Rights Division’s work is. 

The American system is unusual, in global terms, by granting most power over election administration to state and local authorities. While this system makes it hard for the federal government to rig elections, it makes it comparatively easy for state-level officials to cheat and discriminate (Jim Crow being the signature example).

The Civil Rights Division’s election work is one of the primary checks on such abuses. It protects the right to vote, enforcing laws like the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It also works to protect the sanctity of the results after elections, identifying and investigating allegations of illegal conduct by state and local administrators during the voting process. 

Its main area of responsibility is allegations of discrimination, but it also regularly cooperates with other divisions in investigating other kinds of allegations like voting fraud (as happened in November 2020). While the Supreme Court has significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Division is still able to bring cases that matter.

In a second Trump term, this work could be turned on its head. Instead of trying to stop abuses at the state and local level, they might at best ignore them — and at worst try to force local officials to engage in them.

The chapter of Project 2025 on the Justice Department, authored by former Trump DOJ official Gene Hamilton, sketches out how this would work in detail. It argues that Kathy Boockvar, who was Pennsylvania Secretary of State in 2020, “should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted” under a post-Civil War law called the Klan Act — designed, as you might guess, to break the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. 

Boockvar’s crime, per Hamilton, was issuing a legal interpretation designed to address the unprecedented increase in mail-in ballots during the pandemic. The Secretary issued guidance to counties that if a provisional mail-in ballot were “spoiled” — meaning rendered defective through, for example, damage during the shipping process — that voters would have an opportunity to correct them. Hamilton calls this a “conspiracy against rights,” a crime laid out in the Klan Act. 

When I spoke to Justin Levitt, an election law expert and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division, he told me that “it’s difficult to convey how crazy” such a case would be.

The Pennsylvania rule is, in his mind, a very reasonable interpretation of a constitutional obligation to avoid disenfranchising people over minor ballot issues. Even if Boockvar’s interpretation were dubious, nothing in the Klan Act suggests that the Department of Justice would be empowered to prosecute her for it (as the law simply doesn’t cover good-faith mistakes by elected officials trying to count more ballots).

“I know an awful lot of federal prosecutors [and] I don’t know one who would bring this case,” he tells me.

Hence why Schedule F is so important. It’s almost certain that no experienced Justice Department prosecutor would bring this case, be they Democrat or Republican, because they would recognize that it’s an absurd reading of the law. But if Trump can put the Division under his thumb, inserting cronies in oversight positions and firing a huge swath of the career staff, he can get people like Hamilton in a position to do what they want.

Jake Grumbach, a political scientist who studies state-level voting laws, tells me that such politically motivated prosecutions of state officials is “the most dangerous thing [the Justice Department] can do.” 

Even the threat of a civil rights investigation can scare state-level administrators into compliance with what the feds want. A weaponized Justice Department would mean these officials would feel significant pressure to twist their election administration systems into whatever contorted shape Trump was calling for at the moment — with potentially devastating consequences for electoral fairness.

Civil wrongs

While voting rights law is an especially significant area of the Civil Rights Division’s work, it’s far from the only one. 

The Civil Rights Division’s raison d’etre, the entire point of it being a separate and distinct component of the federal government, is to enforce the modern consensus that discrimination on the basis of identity is a pervasive and systematic problem that requires significant federal resources to address.

Trump and his closest allies believe something more like the opposite, that federal civil rights law isn’t a solution to the problem of discrimination against minorities but an agent of discrimination against whites, men, and Christians. As such, they aim to flip the entire civil rights code on its head by using the Civil Rights Division as “the vanguard,” in Gene Hamilton’s language.

“Anything [in law] can be weaponized,” says Kristy Parker, a former Civil Rights Division attorney who worked on policing. “That’s the problem.” 

Since the last Trump administration ended, top Trump aide Stephen Miller has worked with Hamilton at a new law firm — America First Legal — that focuses on “anti-white” discrimination in employment. 

America First filed a suit that successfully blocked a pandemic-era program to distribute financial aid to minority- and woman-owned restaurants. It sued the NFL over the Rooney Rule, which requires that teams interview at least one nonwhite candidate for high-level coaching vacancies, and it went after Northwestern University for allegedly prioritizing hires of minority and non-male faculty members.

In April, Axios’ Alex Thompson reported that America First was “laying legal groundwork” for a full-court press against “anti-white racism” in the event that Trump retakes control of the Civil Rights Division.

This is something that Hamilton explicitly calls for in his Project 2025 chapter.

“The Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements,” he writes.

In reality, what Hamilton calls “discrimination” are actually efforts to address discrimination. There is overwhelming evidence that American society continues to allocate resources unfairly on the basis of race. Without affirmative steps to rectify this situation, entrenched inequalities like the racial gap will never disappear. What Trump and his team call “anti-white discrimination” are efforts to close gaps between groups, not open them.

The Trump team aims to invert federal oversight over local prosecutors in a similar fashion.

In 2023, the campaign released a policy video in which the former president vows to task the Civil Rights Division with investigating “progressive prosecutors.” The basic argument is that these prosecutors, who see part of their mission as reducing the effects of mass incarceration on the Black community, are effectively engaging in race-based discrimination in favor of Black offenders.

“I will direct the DOJ to open civil rights investigations into radical left prosecutor’s offices, such as those in Chicago, LA, and San Francisco, to determine whether they have illegally engaged in race-based enforcement of the law,” Trump said.

Much like the attempt to prosecute Kathy Boockvar, trying to jail “progressive prosecutors” is not something the department’s professional staff would ordinarily contemplate doing. Even if Trump succeeded in replacing them via Schedule F, it’s hard to imagine any such investigation yielding charges that could stand up in court.

But the fact that such investigations would almost certainly fail to yield charges does not make them harmless. Even spurious investigations entail coercive measures — like subpoenas, searches, and audits — that can make it very difficult for “progressive prosecutors” to do their jobs. 

There’s also a political aspect to the threat, as many of Trump’s proposed targets are in elected posts. Elected officials are generally responsive to threats to their reelection chances, and being a target of a Department of Justice civil rights probe looks really bad to prospective voters.

Consent decrees, the mechanism Christy Lopez used to deal with bias in Ferguson, are one of the most powerful tools available to federal prosecutors for addressing bias in policing — and another target in a second Trump term.

The process begins with a fact-finding investigation, uncovering evidence of systematic use-of-force problems and/or racial discrimination. The next stage involves lengthy negotiations with police departments that culminate in a tangible and enforceable set of reform benchmarks for the department. If the benchmarks aren’t being met to the Civil Rights Division’s satisfaction, its attorneys can haul cops in front of a judge and demand answers.

The previous Trump administration limited their use going forward, but a second one might roll them back.

The Obama administration negotiated a historic number of consent decrees, but these are approaching their negotiated sunset dates. The Biden administration has tried to bargain with departments for extensions, as well as implement new ones, but police departments have been dragging their feet. Lopez believes they are anticipating the possibility of a Trump victory.

“Almost any jurisdiction that is currently negotiating a consent decree is going to wait to see what happens in November,” she says. 

If this delaying tactic works and Trump’s Civil Rights Division vacates consent decrees across the board, Lopez warns of aggressive police being unleashed across the country. Trump’s wild rhetoric about policing — his recent statement that cops should be permitted “one really violent day” to combat crime — would further encourage abuse.

The attorneys tasked with limiting police abuses would, in a second Trump administration, be responsible for encouraging them.

A government “for the people” — for now

As important as the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is, it is far from the totality of government work.

The Justice Department has eight other litigating departments beyond the Civil Rights Division, where attorneys prosecute everyone from terrorists to tax cheats. It has five separate police agencies, including the FBI and US Marshals Service. It oversees all federal prisons and studies federal criminal convictions to see if any merit presidential pardons. It has nine separate grantmaking authorities, which provide funding for local authorities supporting everything from assisting sex trafficking victims to encouraging innovation in local alternatives to policing.

The Department of Justice is one of 15 federal departments, each of which has its own diverse and important set of responsibilities. There are also important agencies separate from the department structure, like the CIA and the EPA.

All of them perform critical work that contributes to the standard of living Americans have come to take for granted. This work depends on experienced, dedicated civil servants who know how to do the job, and all of it could be disrupted by Trump’s plans to give their jobs to partisan hacks.

Every day, the EPA works to monitor and address pollution poisoning our rivers and drinkable water. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is churning out job numbers and other reports that the Fed and other places depend on to make good economic policy. US Citizenship and Immigration Services helps keep families together, approving permanent residency and citizenship applications for foreign spouses of American citizens. The Department of Energy manages America’s nuclear weapons and power plants, making sure we don’t experience a Fukushima or Chernobyl-level disaster.

Now imagine the people who know how to do this routine stuff are either thrown out of office or put under the thumbs of political commissars. That’s the danger here. 

Trump and his team have laid out their plans in detail, in official statements proposing a revival of Schedule F and semi-official documents like Project 2025. Even if you agree with many of their policy ideas, they need to be implemented competently and lawfully in order to work. Throughout history, in the United States and elsewhere, the imposition of political control on a civil service has been a recipe for incompetence and anti-democratic abuse.

The United States has a democratic government: a deeply flawed one, but one by the people and for the people. Trump’s plan is to make it for him and his alone, and he has a decent chance of succeeding if elected. We often take our relatively novel form of government for granted; if we lose it, we’ll miss it when it’s gone.