Justice Department civil rights chief Harmeet Dhillon resigns after 18 months

Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, resigned on Thursday after 18 months leading the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, the department announced. She is the first senior department official to depart the Trump administration since Democrats retook control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections.

Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the resignation in a statement on X and thanked Dhillon for her service. "She has defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor," he wrote. "The Department is grateful for her dedicated public service, and we wish her every success in her future endeavors."

In her own statement, Dhillon called the job "the honor of a lifetime" and said, "We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women in girls' sports, and so much more."

A reshaped division

During her tenure, Dhillon pushed out roughly 300 career attorneys, hired inexperienced ideological allies to replace them, and used the division's enforcement powers to advance Trump's policies, according to NPR.

The changes marked a sharp shift for a unit created about 70 years ago during the civil rights movement to end racial segregation in the U.S. For decades, it worked to protect the constitutional rights of Americans in areas including housing, employment, education and policing.

Dhillon, a conservative attorney and Trump loyalist, argued the division had narrowed its mission in recent decades to protecting only the rights of people of color, and she moved to pursue conservative priorities instead. "We don't just slow down the woke," she said at a Federalist Society event in 2025. "We take up the cause to achieve the executive branch's goals."

Under her leadership, the division enforced Trump's executive orders on issues including alleged radical indoctrination in schools, "gender ideology extremism," antisemitism and purported anti-Christian bias. Ahead of the midterms, it sued dozens of states demanding voter information as part of Trump's allegations of voter fraud; election officials pushed back and courts dismissed the lawsuits. The division also accused numerous universities and law schools of discriminating against white and Asian students, and sued UCLA and Harvard over alleged antisemitism on campus.

In an email to staff, Dhillon said she told Trump in early October that she planned to return to private practice after the midterms and that now is the time to do so. "I'm proud of all we've accomplished during this time to ensure our nation's civil rights laws protect every American," she wrote. "I'm also grateful for the hard work of the dedicated employees within the Division and the rest of the Department of Justice."

Stacey Young, a former division attorney who now heads Justice Connection, a group of department alumni that supports DOJ employees, was sharply critical. "Harmeet Dhillon has been the most destructive, lawless, and hateful head of the Civil Rights Division in DOJ history," Young said, adding that Dhillon "decimated" a division that for almost 70 years had enforced the civil rights laws Americans demanded.

Source: NPR News.