The Justice Department Hasn't Abandoned the Rule of Law. It Has Reversed Its Direction.

In April, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche sued Washtenaw County, Michigan, over its sanctuary policy. He had a word for the county's refusal to hold people for federal immigration agents.

This is a lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law and the Federal Government’s obligation to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States. — Todd Blanche

Weeks earlier, a different court was weighing a different act of defiance. After the administration formally withdrew its January 2025 order freezing federal funds, the First Circuit found that the money had not actually started moving again.

For more than a year, the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to freeze critical funding that states rely on to serve their communities, and once again the courts have rejected that unlawful power grab. — Letitia James

The Justice Department — suing the Michigan county in one matter, defending the administration's still-frozen funds in the other — has spent the year moving in two directions at once. In one direction, it sues: 29 states over unredacted voter rolls ^[1], 17 states over in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants, California and Virginia over their gun laws, Minnesota over race-based hiring mandates ^[2]. When district judges have rejected those suits — a Kentucky judge dismissed the voter-roll case outright ^[3] — the department has answered by filing appeals aimed at splitting the circuits and reaching the Supreme Court before November. In the other direction, it has been dismantling the tools that once protected the very people those state policies were written to serve. In December it formally eliminated disparate-impact liability under Title VI, the doctrine that let the government challenge practices that harm minorities even without proof of intent, and wrote the goal into policy ^[4].

It is the policy of the United States to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible. — Donald Trump

In June, the Supreme Court let stand a ruling that ended private lawsuits under Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, leaving the attorney general as the only person who can enforce it — this attorney general ^[5]. The Civil Rights Division that once policed these protections is the same one now suing California and Virginia over their gun laws. The department has stated its own account of the whole enterprise. After purging its January 6 prosecution records from its website and creating a $1.8 billion compensation fund for people it had previously convicted, it described the work in its own terms ^[6].

We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration. — United States Department of Justice

Reversal is the department's own word for it. The gap this leaves behind is concrete. Thomas Saenz of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund put it plainly about the voting-rights provision that now only the attorney general can enforce.

The limited case law regarding private enforcement of Section 208 does not mean that the circuit split is nonexistent, or that the issue is unimportant. — Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund

The withdrawal is not always passive. This spring, when the department urged the Supreme Court to strike down key Voting Rights Act protections, it supplied turnout figures that counted every adult in a state — non-citizens, people barred from voting — rather than eligible voters, and Justice Alito leaned on those numbers ^[7]. By the standard measure, Black turnout in Louisiana has exceeded white turnout only once, in 2012.

Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana. — Samuel Alito

The machinery is running. It is pointed the other way.