Exclusive: DOJ civil rights chief talks police reform, hate as Trump rollbacks feared

WASHINGTON ? Moments after Attorney General Merrick Garland delivered a farewell address to his staff, Kristen Clarke returned to her office in the Justice Department to reflect on her own legacy as the nation’s top civil rights enforcer.

Clarke became the first Black woman to lead the department’s Civil Rights Division while the nation was still reeling from the murder of George Floyd, the rapid spread of a pandemic that disproportionately harmed people of color, and a spike in hate and violence across the country. She said in an exclusive sit-down with USA TODAY that she's most proud of the work the division had done prosecuting the perpetrators of hate crimes and rogue law enforcement officers.

Although her division scored major victories, particularly in the final months of the Biden administration, she couldn’t help but wish it had done more during this “very busy period.”

“This is hard work, and work where I wish there were just, there was just more time in the day to do even more,” she said as she sat surrounded by portraits of civil rights icons including Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and former South African President Nelson Mandela.

Clarke will leave some of that work unfinished. But if she’s worried about the Trump nominee set to replace her, Republican lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, abandoning or rolling back any of the progress she has made over the past four years, she doesn’t show it.

The career employees of the Justice Department “are dedicated folks who hold their head down, follow the facts, apply the law, and work to stand up for the American people, and they have done so from administration to administration, and I'm confident that they'll do so in the road ahead,” Clarke said.

Clarke felt like someone who could 'meet the moment'

Clarke, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants who grew up in a Brooklyn housing project, has said she started her career by turning down high-paying jobs at corporate law firms to take her “dream job” working in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration.

She went on to work at the Civil Rights Bureau in the New York State Attorney General’s Office and lead the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Both forged her outlook, those who worked with her say. “That sort of grounding in the day-to-day client stories and the level and intensity of litigation shaped her perspective, for sure,” said National Women's Law Center President and CEO Fatima Goss Graves, who met Clarke while she was working at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

In 2021, Clarke returned to her dream job. Only this time, she was in charge.

And after four years of the Justice Department taking a backseat on issues like policing in the midst of a national reckoning on racial justice, Graves said it finally “felt like we would have someone to meet the moment.”

Garland quickly pledged to beef up Clarke's civil rights unit and launch an aggressive effort to fight policies that made it more difficult to vote, particularly for marginalized groups. Clarke, a longtime voting rights advocate, went on to sue several Southern states, including Alabama, Texas, Georgia, Virginia and Arizona, over their restrictions on voting.

Clarke keeps a framed copy of the statement issued by Bush in July 2006 when Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in her office. “To me, it is a reminder about our nation's long struggle to ensure that everyone has access to the ballot in our country, and of the bipartisan path that brought us a law that is arguably the most important federal civil rights law that our Congress has ever passed,” she said.

Major wins, but more work to be done on police violence

Garland revoked a Trump administration policy restricting the Justice Department's ability to force police departments investigated for abuse to make changes. That allowed Clarke to shed light on “glaring areas of racial disparity” in public safety, said Legal Defense Fund President and Director-Counsel Janai Nelson, who worked with Clarke in the early 2000s.

The department convicted more than 180 police officers of civil rights abuses, including the officers known as the “Goon Squad” who tortured two Black men in Mississippi and those connected to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Tyre Nichols. And in the final weeks of Biden's presidency, Clarke’s team sprinted to the finish line and secured police-reform agreements with troubled law enforcement agencies in Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky.

Though Clarke said these agreements have a proven track record of success, the work needed to sustain them could be derailed by the incoming administration, and reform efforts in cities like Memphis could be left hanging in the balance. During the previous Trump administration, the Justice Department launched only one investigation into a police department and made the practice of issuing consent decrees much harder.

"I was sworn into my role on the one year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, and it has been not lost on me that we have more work to do to advance the cause of justice," Clarke said.

Combating hate takes a toll on Clarke

How the country will confront the "crisis of hate" is one of the things Clarke said she is most worried about.

As these offenses reached record levels, Clarke’s department successfully prosecuted more than 125 people for such crimes, including three white men who killed Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger in Georgia, the mass shooter who killed 10 Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., and the white supremacist who killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. This month, the Justice Department released a landmark report chronicling the 1921 race massacre when white attackers, including police, killed as many as 300 of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s mostly Black residents.

Traveling the country and hearing from victims of some of the most heinous crimes and discrimination hasn’t been easy, Clarke said, but she hopes making those people feel seen and heard will be a key part of her legacy.

“These are the kind of stories that keep you up at night but also inspire you to come into work every day, to do the very best that you can, to use the law in ways to stand up for our nation's most vulnerable,” she said.

Those who know Clarke say her ability to connect with victims and survivors sets her work apart, including Taylor Dumpson, a hate crime survivor who was successfully represented by Clarke's team at the Lawyers’ Committee in a lawsuit against neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin.

“I see this through her relationship with the family of Dennis and Judy Shepherd, Matthew Shepard’s parents, the families of James Byrd Jr., families of Heather Heyer and families of Khalid Jabara, family of Lieutenant Collins III. Kristen, truly is like a family member to all of us,” Dumpson said. “And so to really be able to see the work she's done in hate crimes, to be able to both raise awareness, but also to enhance the state, local and tribal initiatives to make sure that they have support at the local level has also been really, really important.”

Clarke sees federal employees 'unfairly and unnecessarily targeted'

From the outset, Clarke faced racist attacks as well as pushback from the GOP and right wing commentators. Seeing Clarke use her own lived experiences with racism and sexism to help others has been “very, very inspiring,” said Dumpson, who now works at the attorney general’s office in Rhode Island. She considers Clarke a mentor or "work auntie," someone she can go to for advice on anything from legal issues to workwear, adding that Clarke is known for wearing colorful suits.

During a heated 2?-hour nomination hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, several Senate Republicans, including Ted Cruz of Texas, were fiercely critical of Clarke and questioned whether she could be a nonpartisan enforcer of civil rights given statements she had made on issues such as voting rights, religious liberty and policing.

In July, 10 Senate Republicans, including Cruz, sent a letter to Garland urging him to fire Clarke for failing to disclose that she had been arrested in 2006 for a violent crime before her confirmation. Clarke has said the arrest happened while she was a victim of domestic abuse and wasn’t disclosed because it was expunged from her record.

Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs who worked with Clarke in the New York attorney general’s office, said Clarke has been a frequent target, much like other women of color who are "fighting hate and protecting democracy."

“We saw a number of smears and other attacks directed at Kristen that were just not rooted in reality and that were fundamentally rooted in bigotry … but I have always deeply appreciated how she handled it with grace and with an unyielding focus on the work itself,” Spitalnick said.

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to prosecute his political rivals and throw Garland in jail. When asked if she was concerned for herself or the safety of her family, Clarke acknowledged that she has seen federal employees “unfairly and unnecessarily targeted.”

“I want to see the temperature turned down,” she said.

Advocates fear Trump rollbacks of civil rights

Spitalnick said there are real fears that attacks on women, people of color and public servants more broadly will increase as the Trump administration assumes control. She said there was a packed sendoff for Clarke this week, and it was “bittersweet” as civil rights leaders like Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, and attorney Ben Crump celebrated Clarke’s achievements and advocates simultaneously steeled themselves for the fights they're sure will come.

Trump, meanwhile, seems poised to turn the power of the Civil Rights Division against diversity, equity and inclusion policies designed to benefit the marginalized groups the division was created to protect.

As for Clarke, she’s focused on packing up her office and spending time with family, including her son Miles, a soccer player and college student studying finance and theology. Colleagues say it’s unlikely she’ll stay out of the civil rights fight for long, but Clarke said it will be hard to top the past four years.

"I leave here sad – it's a bittersweet moment – but incredibly proud of what we have been able to accomplish."Contributing: Kristine Phillips, USA TODAY; Brooke Muckerman, Memphis Commercial Appeal; Reuters

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kristen Clarke praises DOJ civil rights work as Trump rollbacks loom