This year hundreds of employees at the Justice Department have been fired. Sometimes, because they clash with the Trump administration, and other times, for reasons they don't even know.
Those departures are spreading fear across the workforce and transforming the Justice Department. The DOJ enjoys vast powers and responsibility for everything from national security to civil rights and public corruption, making it essential to Americans who may not even realize its role in their daily lives.
"The prosecutorial, the criminal power, the investigative power of our government is so important that we do need to pay extra attention to what is occurring at our Department of Justice," said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group dedicated to better government and stronger democracy.
Changes for people who work at the Justice Department happen every day, often far afield of the center of government in Washington, D.C.
July 17 was a typical day at the office for Ila Deiss. The longtime immigration judge heard a couple of cases in the morning before taking a short break to check her email.
"An email came through, saying — I think the heading was 'terminated,'" Deiss said.
She had been fired, with no advance notice, from a job she'd held since 2017. The email said she was being let go. But it did not say why.
"Being on track to resolve a thousand cases this year and never having any bad reviews, having only excellent reviews for years and years and years, I was completely blindsided by this," Deiss said.
She pointed to dashboard statistics for immigration judges that she said show her as the most productive and efficient jurist on her court in San Francisco. (NPR couldn't independently verify those statistics.)
A former law clerk and federal prosecutor, Deiss was only three months shy of 25 years of federal service, when her pension and other benefits would vest.
"I've only worked for the federal government so I'm not a controversial person," she added.
Now, she's trying to find out whether she and her daughter still have health insurance and how she might file for unemployment.
The immigration courts are part of the Justice Department. And Deiss is one of more than 200 career civil servants in the department to lose their jobs this year, according to Justice Connection, a group that works to help current and former DOJ employees.
Stier, of the Partnership for Public Service, said he's more worried about what's happening at DOJ than any other place in the government.
"The Department of Justice is an exceptional institution that has provided a lot of good for our society and is foundering on the rocks right now," Stier said.
Wife of ICEBlock founder laid off
One day after Ila Deiss lost her job in San Francisco, the ax fell on Carolyn Feinstein in Austin, Texas.
"One hundred percent enjoyed this job," Feinstein said. "I would do it for the rest of my career if I had the option to."
Feinstein is a forensic accountant who worked for the U.S. Trustee program, another part of the Justice Department. She helped to police fraud and abuse in the bankruptcy system.
Over seven years, Feinstein says she had stellar performance reviews.
"As far as I'm aware the perception of my work never changed within the program," Feinstein said.
What changed was that her husband developed an app called ICEBlock — to track the movement of immigration agents in U.S. communities.
The app got a lot of attention this summer. People on social media posted about her husband, and eventually about her, too.
Then came attention from right wing-media personalities with ties to leaders inside the White House and the Justice Department — including "border czar" Tom Homan and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
"The only problem I became aware of was pressure from Laura Loomer to Tom Homan and Pam Bondi," Feinstein said.
She said her dismissal leaves a huge part of Texas without an auditor for bankruptcy cases.
"From an administration that states they want efficiency and no waste, how is firing the sole auditor for a large part of Texas efficient?" she asked.
The Justice Department said Feinstein has an interest in a company that holds the intellectual property for the app her husband developed. Feinstein said she owns a minority share in that company only because she needed to be involved to make decisions in case something happened to him.
"ICEBlock is an app that illegal aliens use to evade capture while endangering the lives of ICE officers by disclosing their location," said DOJ spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre. "This DOJ will not tolerate threats against law enforcement or law enforcement officers."
The Trump administration cited the president's Article 2 power under the Constitution to dismiss both Feinstein and Deiss, bypassing civil service laws and other policies in place for decades.
A DOJ lawyer felt like a "punching bag" in court
For people who've worked at the Justice Department over the years, the experience of one former lawyer there stands out.
On a recent sweltering afternoon, Erez Reuveni unwrapped a stack of awards and commendations he earned over 15 years inside the Justice Department.
During the first Trump administration, Reuveni successfully defended the president's travel ban for people from majority Muslim countries.
"As I describe it to junior attorneys, it was possibly the greatest and worst professional experience of my life, given how much we were working around the clock," he said.
Like thousands of other career lawyers at DOJ, he followed the lead of his bosses.
"Being a government lawyer, you don't pick who is president and you don't pick which policies you like to defend and which you don't," Reuveni said. "The job is to defend the agenda, for me the immigration agenda — the policies and priorities of whatever particular administration is in charge."
But soon after being promoted by the Trump administration this year, Reuveni was fired after telling a federal judge that a migrant had been deported to El Salvador in error.
Reuveni said his boss told him the White House wanted to know why he didn't say the migrant, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was a terrorist.
"Career attorneys have to go to court," Reuveni said. "And judges say, 'where's the evidence?' And we have no evidence because there is no evidence."
It's a pattern Reuveni said is happening across the Justice Department this year.
"It's just putting career civil servants in this position of just, sometimes just even looking like fools before courts," he said. "And why would you sign up to do this given that you are being treated as a punching bag and a pawn for these people? They don't care about your livelihood or your reputation."
Lawyer blows the whistle on immigration case
Reuveni took the rare step of filing a whistleblower complaint. In that filing, he argued that political appointees at the Justice Department misled the courts about immigration cases, to ensure people were deported quickly.
"It was such a gut punch to see that the political leadership in charge of the DOJ didn't care one bit about our oaths to the courts and that they had one and only one goal: put those people on planes, and get them out of the country ASAP," he said.
Reuveni highlighted a meeting in mid-March — where then-top DOJ official Emil Bove said they would have to consider saying "f*** you" to the courts if judges tried to block those deportations.
Bove has denied telling anyone at the Justice Department to defy court orders. And he ended up with a promotion — on Tuesday the Senate voted to confirm him as a federal appeals court judge.
Bondi, the attorney general, has called Reuveni a "disgruntled employee" and a leaker who's making false claims and seeking five minutes of fame.
His lawyer Dana Gold, senior director of advocacy and strategy at the Government Accountability Project, said it took months and a team of employment lawyers and three separate ethics lawyers to carefully craft Reuveni's whistleblower complaint. He has the right to blow the whistle about violations of law and abuses of authority, she said.
Reuveni said he worries every day that he might face retaliation by the Justice Department. But he said he decided to go public with his concerns because the Justice Department has changed so much in a matter of weeks.
"My disclosure is just one tiny piece of it," he said. "It's just three weeks in the life of me. But there are many other stories and many other people who have similar experiences."
By coming forward and speaking up, Reuveni said, he hopes others inside the DOJ do, too.
"Because the voice of one, that's one thing, fine; the voice of two, that's better; but a chorus? It's hard to ignore that."
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