U.S. President Donald Trump delivers an address to the nation about the Iran war at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. April 1, 2026.
President Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, warned that the harm done to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division will take “generations to repair.”
She accused her uncle’s administration of gutting an office whose job is to shield Americans from discrimination.
In a YouTube video, Mary, who is a clinical psychologist, singled out Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general in charge of the division, for presiding over the loss of both staff and institutional knowledge.
“The once-storied Civil Rights Division of the DOJ has been brought to its knees under the malign leadership of Harmeet Dhillon,” she said, calling the exodus an “unprecedented destruction of institutional memory.”
She attributed the damage to a presidential power grab, accusing Republican lawmakers and the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court of making it possible for the Trump administration to act as it has.
“Together, they have dismantled protections millions of Americans rely on,” she said. Of Congress, she said it has ceded its constitutional authority to a “rogue executive branch” when it should be holding officials to account and controlling spending.
“The question before Americans is not simply which party will control Congress, but whether the legislative branch will exercise its constitutional responsibilities independent of the president,” she said.
The division was created by the 1957 Civil Rights Act and enforces federal laws against discrimination based on race, sex, disability, religion and the like.
A Human Rights Watch report in August showed the division had shed some 75 percent of its attorneys in what was a larger retreat from civil rights enforcement at several agencies from January 2025 to the spring of 2026.
The watchdog also noted the loss of lawyers and investigators with decades of experience in building cases against discrimination. With offices closing and investigations being dropped, the report cautioned that those in need of protection were being left without adequate recourse.
Over 200 ex-employees of the Justice Department sounded the alarm in December 2025 that the administration was taking apart the division and its leaders were walking away from matters of police brutality, sexual harassment and voting discrimination. The department told Reuters then that its leadership was in fact putting the division back on track to its original mission of defending the rights of all Americans.
Then in September, the department announced the dismissal of more than 50 school desegregation cases that had been on court dockets for more than half a century.
Dhillon said the circumstances in the classrooms no longer warranted the kind of federal oversight that was in place. According to the department, it was going through the cases individually and would ask for their dismissal once it concluded that a district had achieved unitary status.
