WhatsappGovernment lawyers don’t want to protect Jewish students or enforce immigration laws, and “The New York Times” and leftist Jews agree. It’s time to clean house at the DOJ.
(May 2, 2025 / JNS)
In a series of articles published in the last week, The New York Times has given voice to the anguish and outrage of the career lawyers at the U.S. Department of Justice who are upset at the Trump administration’s policy changes. They think that by altering the focus of the department’s efforts, particularly the Civil Rights Division, President Donald Trump and his appointees are abandoning the rule of law and using the power of the government to persecute those it should be protecting.
Their point of view was supported not only by the sympathetic coverage of the Times but at May Day demonstrations across the country, as well as by protests organized by lawyers that not coincidentally also occurred on the traditional day of Marxist activism.
But the more you read about their complaints and the umbrage they are expressing about the orders they are receiving from their new bosses, the more you realize what is really upsetting them and why the administration is seeking to clean house at the DOJ. Far from ordering government lawyers to do terrible things, Trump has only asked them to follow the orders of the democratically elected government and to, among other things, enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect Jewish students and to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.
And, as far as that is concerned, both tasks are actions they are not only not prepared to do but are outraged at the mere thought that they should be asked to do them.
How can that be?
One is that, like much of the federal bureaucracy, the lawyers at the Department of Justice are civil-service employees. Thus, they are the permanent staff while the politically appointed heads of the various divisions of the department, as well as the Attorney General, come and go with each passing administration, leading the staff lawyers to often treat them as people whose orders should be taken with a grain of salt.
The federal civil-service system was put into place in the late 19th century by reformers like the young Theodore Roosevelt to prevent government jobs from being merely pieces of political patronage to be doled out to supporters of the government of the day. It was a fine idea in its time, but by the 21st century, it has led the creation of an administrative state that is dominated by the left, and acts as an unelected and unaccountable fourth branch of government entitled to thwart the will of administrations they don’t like, such as those led by President Trump.
Living in the past
Trump has rightly concluded that this cannot be allowed to continue, and he is moving, piece by piece, to dismantle this “deep state.”
This has led to accusations of authoritarianism on the part of his liberal and left-wing critics. But they have it backward. In this case, it is Trump—and not those caterwauling about the destruction of democracy—who is actually defending democratic principles against anti-democratic forces.
The DOJ staff is like the rest of the federal bureaucracy, largely composed of left-leaning professionals who believe that their point of view about the law is the only one that deserves respect and that conservative opinion about the subject should be dismissed out of hand.
That’s particularly true of the civil-rights division.
It came into existence in the 1950s when, in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision, the DOJ was the branch of government that was utilized to enforce the laws against racial segregation. And after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, it was Washington’s weapon that was deployed to ensure the demolition of discriminatory “Jim Crow” laws and practices throughout the nation. The DOJ won those battles and deserves a great deal of the credit for the enormous—indeed, transformative—advances toward equality that occurred in the United States in the last 60 years.
The problem, though, is that most of those who work in the DOJ think that they should be operating as if it were still 1965 and not 2025. Even worse, they seem to be heavily influenced by the rise of woke ideology like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that teaches, among other toxic ideas, that there is no such thing as racial progress. Under this deluded approach, America is an irredeemably racist nation locked in a permanent race war between people of color who are always victims and “white” oppressors who cannot change and are always in the wrong.
That leads to a mindset that would have the DOJ go on conducting itself as if Jim Crow laws and efforts to prevent African-Americans from voting hadn’t been eradicated decades ago; America hadn’t elected a black president twice; and the establishment of “minority-majority” districts throughout the nation had not led to the election of vast numbers of minority representatives.
That’s part of the reason why these left-wing lawyers on the government payroll think the job of the DOJ’s Civil Rights division is to mandate the implementation of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) throughout the country. These rules amount to racial quotas that are the opposite of the equal opportunity and color-blind laws that the leaders of the civil-rights movement, like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., believed in and which pointedly exclude Jews, who are also a discriminated-against minority, from its “inclusion” policies.
Investigating Columbia
Once you understand that, it becomes easier to explain both the reactions of the DOJ staff to Trump’s orders and why the Times thinks it is right to be angry about them, sentiments that are made clear in its article titled, “Orders to Investigate Columbia Protesters Raised Alarms in Justice Dept.”
The story describes the alarm and consternation of the government lawyers when they were ordered by Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove to conduct an “aggressive investigation” into acts of antisemitic intimidation and violence directed at Jewish students and faculty at Columbia University by pro-Hamas protesters on the school’s campus on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Needless to say that if there were similar actions directed against African-American or Hispanic students at Columbia by groups of students with a political agenda, there would have been no hesitation about making them feel the full force of the law, let alone merely investigating their activities. Such discriminatory practices put these “activists”—and the university administration that tolerated and even encouraged them—afoul of the Civil Rights Act. Any hesitation on the part of the government when it comes to protecting such minority students would have been considered a scandal by the Times. Nor would anyone, let alone the lawyers of the Civil Rights Division, accept such harassment of blacks by racist students and groups, including chants praising anti-black terrorism or a genocide against them, as merely an exercise of their constitutionally protected right to free speech.
But as the article notes, the government lawyers who were given this entirely reasonable and much-needed order to act to protect Jewish students and to find out whether there had been violations of civil rights and anti-terrorism laws, thought it “unjustified and might violate the First Amendment.” They were also angered by orders they were given to give any information, including lists of members of pro-Hamas groups, they might find about those engaged in these illegal acts, to immigration authorities.
Would any of them have hesitated to do so if white supremacists were running amuck at Columbia or any other campus? Of course not. Nor would they have hesitated to send the FBI agents who work with them to the place where such acts of racist intimidation were occurring.
The lawyers at the Civil Rights division, however, simply balked at obeying such orders when Jews were the targets of the mobs. And they were joined in what was obviously an effort to slow walk the DOJ’s orders by other federal lawyers who worked in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. As a result, despite the desire of Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon and Bove, the criminal investigation into antisemitism at Columbia has fizzled.
Again, if this had been an investigation into anti-black racism at Columbia, the stories in the Times about this series of events would have resonated with outrage at the government’s failure and the recalcitrant attitude of the DOJ lawyers to do their jobs.
They won’t protect Jewish students
Instead, the point of the articles was to highlight what the Times’ sources inside the DOJ as well as its “experts” commenting on the affair felt was the inappropriate nature of any orders to investigate the antisemitism of pro-Hamas groups or to find out whether any of those who had committed these outrages were foreign students violating the terms of their visas. They all seem to think that an administration determined to protect Jewish students and enforce immigration laws is a danger to the Constitution and democracy.
That does make sense if you think that Jews are, by definition, unworthy of civil-rights law protections and enforcing immigration laws is a form of tyranny.
But the assertion that this position is somehow a principled stand rather than an indefensible effort to enable antisemitism and to thwart the legal orders of the elected government is what is truly outrageous.
That’s the context for the widespread claims that Trump and his appointees are riding roughshod over the law or engaging in abusing their power or bullying federal employees.
It’s not Trump, Bondi, Bove or Dhillon who is in the wrong in seeking to use the DOJ to enforce the law. On the contrary, it is the permanent DOJ staff and their leftist cheerleaders at the Times who have contempt for both law and principle, not to mention little or no interest in defending Jews against antisemitic actions on the part of mobs of terror-supporting thugs.
This fully demonstrates why what’s needed is an effort to rid the DOJ of lawyers who think the people at Columbia who are targeting Jews are the ones who need to be defended rather than their victims.
Opposing efforts to stop antisemitism
It is high time that the federal government uses its power to roll back the reign of racially discriminatory DEI actions at schools throughout the country.
Sadly, it’s not just the Times and leftist lawyers on the federal payroll who think that Trump is wrong to act on enforcing civil rights and immigration laws when it comes to pro-Hamas Jew-haters. Some of those who purport to speak for American Jews, like Abe Foxman, the longtime former head of the Anti-Defamation League, and a group of 500 rabbis from the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements, have taken to mimicking the rhetoric of antisemitic groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Foxman disgraced himself and forever tarnished his legacy by using a congressional Holocaust commemoration to describe the efforts of Trump’s DOJ to target antisemites and enforce the laws by claiming that the government is “abducting” innocent people. He also used that moment to denounce efforts to drive DEI discrimination from higher education.
Foxman and the left-wing rabbis are part of a partisan pushback against Trump’s campaign to fundamentally reform the Department of Justice as well as American education.
What this effort is exposing is not wrongdoing on Trump’s part. It’s the way so much of our country’s liberal establishment is committed to leftist policies that are essentially racist as well as harmful to Jews. Far from being damaging, Trump’s revolution at the DOJ, and in particular, at the Civil Rights division, is a long-overdue effort to return it to the fight for justice. Instead, it has been weaponized for an ideological crusade for leftist ideas that are aimed at toppling Western ideals and enabling antisemitism.
Trump should do all he can to push these leftist lawyers out of the DOJ and replace them with people who are committed to a justice system that doesn’t enable Jew-haters in the name of toxic progressive myths about race.
