The Trump Administration has fulfilled Project 2025’s promise to shut down the Department of Homeland Security’s internal oversight offices, including its civil rights office. The entire staff of those offices has received “reduction in force” (RIF) notices announcing that their employment will be terminated in the next couple of months. Why? Department leadership is clear: because the offices stood in the way of the department’s roughshod disregard for immigrant rights. The move violates the law, shields the Administration’s lawlessness from detection and oversight, and demonstrates Trump’s contempt for civil rights.

Congress assembled the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002 from components scattered across the executive branch. The Homeland Security Act of 2002, which joined them together, was a key part of the response to the 9/11 attacks; the law rested on the belief that breaking down walls between agencies would make anti-terrorism work more effective. But breaking down those walls also created an acute risk to civil rights and civil liberties. Recognizing the threat from the new security behemoth, Congress specifically chose to build in a novel internal watchdog—an “Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties” tasked to “review and assess information alleging abuses of civil rights, civil liberties, and racial and ethnic profiling by employees and officials of the Department.”

Since then, Congress hasn’t just maintained the office; it’s doubled down. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 added to DHS’s assigned missions the responsibility to “ensure that the civil rights and civil liberties of persons are not diminished” by its programs. And the presidentially appointed head of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, now known as CRCL, was assigned a dual statutory mandate. Not only would the office investigate complaints, but it would also affirmatively engage with the development and implementation of policy to protect civil rights. Congress instructed CRCL’s lead to “oversee compliance” with civil rights/civil liberties requirements under U.S. law and to provide policy advice and oversight to “ensure that the protection of civil rights and civil liberties is appropriately incorporated into Department programs and activities.”

Three years later, in the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007, Congress anticipated and preemptively countered the possible starvation or exclusion of CRCL—that is, precisely the Trump Administration’s current approach. Congress expressly required DHS to ensure that the office’s head has the necessary information, resources, and personnel; is advised in advance of proposed policy changes; and is at the table when new policies or programs are considered. And over the years, including recently, Congress has backed its assignments with money, often giving CRCL more than DHS itself requested.

In short, congressional support for CRCL has been strong, bipartisan, and longstanding.

I led CRCL in President Obama’s first term, and as a law professor I have analyzed internal oversight offices like CRCL. I know that they don’t have silver bullets; they are set up to have influence over their agencies, but not true authority. (My law journal article about CRCL and other similar offices was subtitled “Influence Without Authority in Federal Agencies.”) This means they cannot stop determined and high-level decisions to subvert the law. Even before the RIF, CRCL did not, for example, have the ability to end the Trump Administration’s transfer of Venezuelans to what seem to be torturous conditions in a notorious El Salvador prison, which is being carried out in direct violation of the human rights principle of non-refoulement. (Non-refoulement forbids sending people to a country where they face a risk of persecution, torture, or other serious human rights violations, and has been incorporated into American law by both treaty and statute.) DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s evident relish for this lawless practice has no doubt overridden any staff-level objections coming out of CRCL.

But that doesn’t mean that CRCL has been useless. In fact, it has made a significant difference in both Democratic and Republican administrations. For example, CRCL played a key role in improving DHS’s policies to prevent sexual abuse in immigration detention, and in building systems to bridge language barriers. And it was CRCL staff who sounded the alarm inside the government (and then outside the government) when the first Trump Administration not only ripped families apart at the border, but neglected to record the identity and location of family members, effectively orphaning thousands of children.

The other two DHS offices being eliminated are the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. Both are problem-solving offices that allow members of the public who alert the department to things going wrong to get a response rather than a runaround. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin offered this justification for closing all three offices and in the process apparently firing 300 staff members: “These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission. Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.” But that’s the whole point! Congress created CRCL precisely to put the brakes on runaway operations that threaten civil rights.

Following the Project 2025 approach, the Administration’s response to this (nonoptional) congressional direction is to point out that codified references to CRCL refer not to the “Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties” but to its “Officer.” This is nonsense. Statutory synecdochic use of “Officer” follows ordinary drafting practice, but it’s clear that Congress had in mind a staffed office, not a party of one; one person alone could not possibly carry out the statutory assignments summarized above.

The DHS chapter of Project 2025, drafted by Ken Cuccinelli, proposed to shrink CRCL’s work to the absolutely irreducible minimum. For example, it suggested that civil rights investigations be carried out not by CRCL but by whatever operational component (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, etc.) is the subject of the complaint, backstopped only by the Office of Inspector General—which focuses nearly entirely on criminal misconduct, not violations of the Constitution or civil rights law and not policy or implementation deficits causing such violations. The CRCL officer’s role would simply be to tell complainants where to file complaints. And even this new disempowered role, Project 2025 said, should be shifted to sit within the Office of the General Counsel (OGC).

This seems to be the path DHS is following now—and if, as seems possible, new people are hired to carry out even this shrunken assignment, that would itself violate the civil service laws, which require that individuals subject to a RIF get dibs on new positions related to their old ones. But hiring new people unencumbered by any career commitment to civil rights will have obvious advantages from the Administration’s perspective. And putting them in OGC will set up a claim that even if they do offer any advice, it is legally privileged—meaning it cannot be released to Congress or Freedom of Information Act requesters. (Note that any claim of privilege would probably violate both the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 and the statutory requirement that CRCL disclose to Congress “the type of advice provided and the response given to such advice.”)

Shutting down DHS’s watchdog offices flouts numerous congressional enactments. As in so many other areas, the Administration is asserting anti-constitutional authority to disregard the law. The general strategy is calculated: Threaten and extort private lawyers; defund the public interest bar; undermine judicial independence; fire watchdogs. It is all a smash-and-grab with an eye to increasing executive impunity.

More specifically, CRCL has the job of opposing the kinds of abuses DHS is now publicly committing—arresting lawful immigrants apparently based on their First Amendment-protected speech; deporting asylum-seekers without providing them the opportunity to demonstrate that they legitimately fear persecution in their home countries; deporting individuals based on alleged gang membership without giving them any process for disputing the allegations; and who knows what other horrors. With CRCL gone, it’s that much less likely that anyone inside DHS will object to civil rights violations, and that much harder for outside watchdogs—and through them the public—to learn what is going on.

Make no mistake: The Administration is not merely chipping away at the edges of civil rights enforcement, going after only the overreach it asserts has occurred under the label of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). President Trump and his appointees disdain all rights that attach to anyone not already their ally. Day by day, they are taking steps toward unfettered power.