WATCH: Former DOJ civil rights chief slams ‘decimation’ of department’s voting rights work

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In 2021, Kristen Clarke became the first Black woman to serve as the Department of Justice’s civil rights chief. Five years later, she says the department has “fully retreated from the mission.”

And she’s ready to fight back.

“The Justice Department is our highest law enforcement agency,” Clarke said in an interview with Democracy Docket. “They’ve got tremendous resources, talented career people. And sadly, we have seen this administration gut the Justice Department. And those attacks have been especially relentless when it comes to the Civil Rights Division, which is nothing more than a shadow of its former self.”

Clarke, who is stepping into the role of general counsel at the NAACP, said that under the Biden administration, the Justice Department prioritized protecting voting rights. Now, she said, the focus has shifted toward undermining them.

“When it comes to voting rights, this is where we’ve seen true decimation,” Clarke told Democracy Docket Legal Content Editor Ashley Cleaves. “Many of the important and carefully built cases that we developed during my tenure were withdrawn from the courts, dismissed without basis, without any justification offered to the public.”

And, referring to well-documented DOJ missteps, including missing deadlines, typos in court filings and unintentionally revealing a federal civil rights probe in a social media post, she slammed the DOJ for “reckless, sloppy work.”

“It’s a Justice Department that has been decimated,” Clarke said. “And its ranks are now being filled by people who are inexperienced, who don’t know what they’re doing, who’ve never enforced federal laws before.”

Access to the ballot box is paramount for the NAACP and Clarke said she’s prepared to use all available tools to respond to what may come next.

Ongoing redistricting battles across the nation – which will soon culminate in a landmark Supreme Court decision – mean that Clarke is gearing up to defend the Voting Rights Act as we know it.

“We are an incredible, increasingly diverse America and we will not stop the demand to ensure that everyone has a voice in shaping what democracy looks like,” Clarke said.

And as President Donald Trump continues his crusade to restrict the vote through efforts like the SAVE America Act, currently stalled in the Senate, and a recent executive order banning mail-in voting, while red states impose their own restrictions, Clarke said the stakes are higher than ever.

Meanwhile, Clarke has spent her career enforcing federal laws. As she marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in March in honor of ‘Bloody Sunday,’ Clarke reflected on the vital mission of the American government.

“This is a moment where we should all be reimagining the kind of democracy that we need and deserve,” Clarke said. “One that will not fall prey to authoritarian threats ever again and one in which we have a constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.”