Harmeet Dhillon has resigned as head of the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division after 18 tumultuous months in the role, becoming the first senior Trump administration official to leave since Democrats regained control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections.
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced her departure on X, saying he had accepted the resignation of the assistant attorney general.
“Today, I accepted the resignation of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who led the Civil Rights Division with conviction the past 18 months,” Mr Blanche wrote. “She has defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor. The Department is grateful for her dedicated public service, and we wish her every success in her future endeavors.”
Ms Dhillon, a conservative attorney and Trump loyalist, radically reshaped the division during her tenure. Roughly 300 attorneys were pushed out, while inexperienced ideological allies were hired to replace them, according to the account of her time in office.
The changes represented a sharp departure for a division created about 70 years ago during the campaign against racial segregation in the United States. For decades, it had pursued cases involving constitutional rights in areas including housing, employment, education and policing.
Ms Dhillon argued that the division had focused too heavily on protecting people of colour and redirected it towards conservative priorities. At a Federalist Society event in 2025, she said: “We don’t just slow down the woke. We take up the cause to achieve the executive branch’s goals.”
Under her leadership, the division pursued enforcement of Donald Trump’s executive orders, including measures aimed at ending what the administration described as radical indoctrination in schools, protecting women from “gender ideology extremism”, and combating antisemitism and alleged anti-Christian bias.
In the run-up to the midterm elections, the Civil Rights Division sued dozens of states seeking voter information in support of Mr Trump’s allegations of voter fraud. Election officials opposed the demands and courts dismissed the department’s lawsuits.
The division also accused universities and law schools of discriminating against white and Asian students. It sued UCLA and Harvard over allegations that antisemitism had been allowed to flourish on campus.
Former division lawyers criticised Ms Dhillon’s approach and its impact on the department. Stacey Young, a former attorney who now leads Justice Connection, a group of department alumni supporting Justice Department employees, said: “Harmeet Dhillon has been the most destructive, lawless, and hateful head of the Civil Rights Division in DOJ history.”
“Dhillon wielded the enormous power of the Justice Department to threaten universities, state and local officials, and election workers in spurious cases that rarely won in court,” Ms Young said.
She added: “Americans’ civil rights don’t enforce themselves. For almost 70 years, the Civil Rights Division brought to fruition the civil rights laws that Americans demanded. Dhillon decimated it.”
