Trump’s Justice Department in Crisis as Thousands of Lawyers Quit
The Department of Justice lacks lawyers.
The nation’s largest law firm has repeatedly requested delays in processing its countless cases and, in doing so, accidentally disclosed a massive personnel crisis raging beneath the surface.
In an obscure civil trial unearthed by an independent journalist Scott MacFarlanea Justice Department lawyer revealed that “the Appellate Division has lost more than 40% of its lawyers since February 2025, due to retirements, resignations or temporary transfers.”
“At the moment, it is not possible for me to entrust this matter to yet another lawyer, who should devote time to studying the issues,” she wrote in a file dated February 19.
The overwhelming stress within the agency has also seeped through the cracks in other ways. In early February, a volunteer attorney with Minnesota’s understaffed office handling ICE cases begged a judge to hold her in contempt of court so she could “get 24 hours of sleep.”
“The system sucks, this job sucks, I’m trying every moment to get you what I need,” lawyer Julie Le said when asked why the government had failed to comply with court orders. Since then, Le was deleted from the temporary position and reinstated to ICE. She has since taken advantage of the notoriety of her comments to launch a candidacy for Congress for Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District.
The DOJ’s appeals staff varies in size, but totals more than 150 positions, according to a 2012 report in Scottus Blog by Al J. Daniel Jr., a former DOJ appellate attorney.
Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg of the department’s personnel problems. There was an estimate 10,000 lawyers working in the Department of Justice before Donald Trump’s return to the White House. By September 2025, this figure had been reduced by almost half: Judicial Connectionan advocacy group that tracks DOJ departures, estimated that about 5,500 people (not all lawyers) had left the department, either of their own accord, accepting the Trump administration’s takeover, or being fired.
Only a fraction of these experienced employees were replaced, leading to a huge backlog of work. The immigration court system, which has been under enormous strain due to Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda, has been particularly hobbled, experiencing a backlog of more than 3.3 million cases as of the end of February 2026, according to Immigration Department data. Transactional Document Access Clearinghouse. This means that the lives of more than three million people are effectively on pause as they await legal decisions that will determine whether their futures will be inside or outside the United States.
The Justice Department’s rightward shift toward the MAGA agenda has raised concerns within the legal community, with former prosecutors and ethics directors saying the recent politicization of the agency has undermined public confidence in the nation’s justice system.
