DOJ reassigned top attorneys. They quit after feeling sidelined.

In the first weeks of the current Trump administration, Justice Department officials gave a select group of top senior career attorneys a choice: They could either quit or go to a newly created Sanctuary Cities Enforcement working group.

About a dozen lawyers from high-profile sections including the civil rights and national security divisions agreed to the transfer, jumping into an area most had no experience with but knew was one of the department’s top priorities.

Six months later, all of those attorneys have left DOJ for good, the last one packing up this week. And five people familiar with the working group say they got the impression that the task force was designed to do nothing but frustrate and eventually force out lawyers the administration felt it could replace with people more loyal to the president.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

The working group’s name may have suggested its members would be helping to challenge “sanctuary city” policies, which municipalities use to limit or prohibit their employees from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. But instead, the people said, members were asked to do Google-type searches and other menial research on those policies — and were told there was no need to communicate with the lawyers who were actually filing high-profile lawsuits against such jurisdictions as Los Angeles, New York and Denver.

“The assignment was a sham,” said Bonnie Robin-Vergeer, former chief of the Civil Rights Division’s appellate section, who quit after six weeks. “We did very little.”

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