Top Justice Department official on police reform and abortion to leave

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta is leaving the Justice Department after three years overseeing some of the administration’s most contentious legal issues ranging from protecting abortion rights to criminal and police reform efforts, according to the department.

Gupta is the first woman of color and first civil rights attorney to hold the Justice Department’s No. 3 post, which oversees the department’s civil litigation sections including antitrust enforcement, as well as the Civil Rights and the Environmental and Natural Resources divisions.

Her departure early next year is expected to come after the Justice Department completes its critical incident review of the law enforcement response to the May 2022 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

In a statement to CNN, Attorney General Merrick Garland thanked Gupta for her work and for being one of his trusted advisers.

“Vanita’s commitment to the pursuit of justice, and her relentless focus on bringing people together to find common ground, has made her an incredibly effective leader in dealing with some of the most complex challenges facing the American people,” Garland said. “Vanita has played an essential role in our work to fulfill DOJ’s mission to uphold the rule of law, keep our country safe, and protect civil rights. … I am confident that her enormous contributions to the Department will continue to be felt long after her departure.”

Gupta is credited with helping to oversee major legal settlements in tort cases brought against the federal government by victims in mass shootings, including at Sutherland Springs, Parkland and the Charleston Mother Emanuel AME Church.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade last June, she helped establish the Justice Department’s Reproductive Rights Task Force.

As the chair of the task force, Gupta is leading the push to scrutinize legal threats to reproductive health rights, including suing the state of Idaho for restricting access to abortion to patients who need lifesaving medical treatment and fighting to protect access to the widely used abortion drug mifepristone.

Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, credited Gupta with juggling “so many issues that are directly affecting people’s lives.”

“That’s a lot of work. That’s a lot of weight,” Wiley said. “And what she brought to it was not only the commitment to withstand that weight, but to carry it. And in some instances, importantly, tocarry it over the finish line.”

Gupta’s work as a civil rights lawyer appeared to cut against the grain when major police groups rallied to support her nomination as associate attorney general, helping to overcome objections from Senate Republicans. For years, Gupta has been a constant at police conventions, sometimes enduring hostile audiences as she argued for policing reforms.

During her time leading civil rights enforcement in the Obama administration, Gupta launched pattern or practice investigations of police forces in Baltimore and Chicago. Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, said Gupta managed to gain the confidence of officers in those cities despite investigating them.

“She will go toe to toe. She does it in a very civil way, and not back down an inch. And she gains respect,” Pasco said. “I told her one time she can talk a dog off a meat wagon.”

Confirmed just one day after former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of killing George Floyd in 2021, Gupta stepped into office as Americans were reckoning with what many saw as flawed systems of policing.

That feeling was further bolstered when, one year later, police failed to quickly respond to a deadly rampage at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, when a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers and remained in the school for more than an hour while officers waited nearby.

In response, Gupta helped lead the Justice Department push for better strategies to build trust between police and the communities they serve. One of those efforts was to revamp a departmentpolice reform program that offered voluntary federal help to local law enforcement agencies in reducing officer-involved shootings and excessive-force incidents.

The Justice Department review in Uvalde one that Gupta helped engineer with Mayor DonMcLaughlin. The botched police response had prompted pressure from victim families for federal action, but Biden administration officials were confronted with limited jurisdiction to investigate anda state government that has repeatedly sued the federal government.

McLaughlin told CNN he personally called Gupta, because he didn’t trust the state to investigate its own response.

“Was she surprised when you said, ‘OK, I’m gonna have you come in?’” CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz asked McLaughlin of Gupta.

“I want the truth of this to come out,” McLaughlin responded. “If there’s one thing that was done wrong with that deal that we can tell some other community so they can correct that, we need toknow, and they need to know.”

The department review is ongoing, and investigators have analyzed more than 13,000 pieces of evidence connected to the massacre and police response, and have interviewed more than 200 people, including law enforcement officers, family members, school personnel and witnesses.

CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz and Matthew Friedman contributed to this report.

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