How firing hundreds of employees this year has transformed the Justice Department

0:00July 17th was a typical day at the office for Isla Dice. The longtime immigration judge heard a couple cases in the morning before taking a short break to check her email. A email came through saying I think the heading was terminated. Terminated with no notice from a job that she has held since 2017. The email said that she was being let go, but it did not say why.

0:26Carrie Johnson:Being on track to resolve a thousand cases this year and never having any bad reviews, only excellent reviews for years and years and years, I was completely blindsided by this. The immigration courts are part of the Justice Department. Dice says she 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. Pointing to dashboard statistics available to immigration judges, Dice says she was by far the most productive and efficient jurist in her court in San Francisco. Consider this.

1:08Dice is one of hundreds of career civil servants at the Justice Department to lose their jobs this year. Some over clashes with the Trump administration and others for unknown reasons. After the break, how those departures are transforming the Justice Department.

1:29From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang.

1:40It's Consider This from NPR. Max Steyer is president of the Partnership for Public Service. That's a nonpartisan group dedicated to better government and stronger democracy. 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. Steyer says he's more worried about what's happening at DOJ than at any other place inside the federal government. 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 the Department of Justice.

2:17NPR's Carrie Johnson covers the Justice Department and picks it up from here. One day after Isla Dice lost her job in San Francisco, the axe fell on Carolyn Feinstein in Austin, Texas. 100 % enjoyed this job. I would do it for the rest of my career if I had the option to. Feinstein's a forensic accountant who worked for the U.S. Trustee Program, another part of the Justice Department. She helped police fraud an abuse in the bankruptcy system. Over seven years, she says she had stellar performance reviews. As far as I'm aware, the perception of my work never changed within the program. What changed was that her husband developed an app called IceBlock to track the movement of immigration agents in U.S.

3:02communities. 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. The only problem I became aware of was pressure from Laura Loomer to Tom Homan and Pam Bondi. Feinstein says 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? The Justice Department says Feinstein owns part of the company that controls the intellectual property for her husband's app, which DOJ says allows migrants to escape and endangers law enforcement by sharing their location.

3:57The Trump administration cited the president's Article II power under the Constitution in its notices dismissing both Feinstein and Dice, bypassing civil service laws and other policies in place for decades. Again, Max Dyer. We're really talking about virtually the entire workforce in one way, form, or other being reshaped in the worst possible way. For people who've worked at the Justice Department, the experience of one former lawyer there stands out. There's a box of my various awards. Here's one from the first Trump administration for the Sanctuary Cities team. Here is Ruvaini's unwrapping a stack of awards he earned over 15 years inside the Justice Department.

4:42During the first Trump administration, Ruvaini 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. 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. The job is to defend the agenda, for me, the immigration agenda, the policies and priorities of whatever particular administration is in charge.

5:17But soon after being promoted by the Trump administration this year, Ruvani was fired after telling a federal judge a migrant had been deported to El Salvador in error. Ruvaney says 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 and judges say, where's the evidence? And we have no evidence because there is no evidence. It's a pattern Ruvaney says is happening across the Justice Department this year. It's just putting career civil servants in this position of just sometimes even just looking like fools before courts.

5:54And why would you sign up to do this, given that you are being treated as just a punching bag and a pawn for these people? They don't care about your livelihood or your reputation. Riveni took the rare step of filing a whistleblower complaint. In that filing, he argues political appointees at the DOJ 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. They had one and only one goal, put those people on planes, get them out of the country ASAP.

6:32Ravini highlighted a meeting in mid-March where top DOJ official Emil Bovey said they would have to consider saying F you to the courts if judges tried to block those deportations. Bovey has denied telling anyone at the Justice Department to defy court orders, and he just got promoted to become a federal appeals court judge. Attorney General Pam Bondi has called Ruvaney a disgruntled employee and a leaker who's making false claims and seeking five minutes of fame. Ruvaney says he worries every day about the DOJ going after him, but he says he decided to go public with his concerns because the Justice Department has changed so much in a matter of weeks.

7:12My disclosure, just one tiny piece of it. 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, Ruvini says, he hopes others inside DOJ do too. Because a voice of one, that's one thing, fine. Voice of two, that's better. But a chorus, it's hard to ignore that. Kerry Johnson, NPR News, Washington. This episode was produced by Elena Burnett, Christine Aerosmith, and Jordan Marie Smith. It was edited by Sammy Yenigan, Ashley Brown, Nadia Lancey, and Anna Yukononoff. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

7:55It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.