This piece is part of a series on Obamas legacy that The Huffington Post will be publishing over the next week.

WASHINGTON Last month, a few weeks after Donald Trump was elected and not long after he selected Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) as his nominee for attorney general, employees of the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division gathered in the cavernous Great Hall inside the Robert F. Kennedy Building.

At the event, top Justice Department officials honored the attorneys who had handled the most complicated and controversial civil rights investigations in recent memory:

• The dozen people behind the divisions blistering report on the Baltimore City Police Department, which a 15-month investigation concluded displayed patterns of unconstitutional conduct.

• The two attorneys who secured the first hate crime convictions involving both racial and sexual orientation bias in a case in which a gay black man was attacked with a frying pan and a sock filled with batteries, pistol-whipped, sodomized with a broom, whipped with a belt and doused with bleach on his face and in his eyes.

• The lawyer who moved his entire family to Arizona to take on the Maricopa County Sheriffs Office, which was run until recently by Joe Arpaio, the prominent Trump supporter currently facing a criminal contempt of court charge for disobeying a federal judges order in a racial profiling case.

• A lawyer who helped challenge North Carolinas HB2, an anti-LGBT law that would ban transgender individuals from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity.

• The deputy chief of the Civil Rights Divisions criminal section, who won convictions against dozens of abusive law enforcement officers.

Under President Barack Obama , the federal government has often been at the forefront of civil rights issues, staking out aggressive positions on key civil liberties and boosting the work of advocates. The question many career Civil Rights Division attorneys are pondering is whether theyll be able to keep doing their work .

A lot of the issues that folks believe are most vulnerable are the very issues where this Justice Department has been out in front, Vanita Gupta, chief of the Civil Rights Division, said in a recent interview in a conference room that once served as J. Edgar Hoovers office. Thats voting rights, thats policing, thats criminal justice reform, its LGBT rights .