Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who led the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and reshaped it around President Donald Trump's priorities, resigned on Thursday. She is the first senior department official to leave the administration since Democrats won control of the House and Senate in Tuesday's midterm elections, NPR reported.
"Today, I accepted the resignation of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who led the Civil Rights Division with conviction the past 18 months," Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote on X. "She has defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor." Bloomberg Law first reported her plans.
"My decision, my choice"
Dhillon told Fox News Digital that the timing was not about the election results. "I wasn't asked to resign," she said. "I resigned three weeks ago, and Susie asked me to please wait until after the midterms," referring to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. She said she had told Wiles she believed she had "accomplished everything" she came to Washington to do and wanted to return to private practice. "My decision, my choice," she said. "It's time."
Asked whether she would testify if subpoenaed by the new Democratic majority, she said executive privilege would limit what she could discuss but that she would seek legal advice and follow it. Asked about a possible pardon, she said she had never discussed one with Trump and had done nothing "that would require that." On X, she called the job "the honor of a lifetime," writing: "We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women and girls' sports, and so much more."
A division remade
Trump nominated Dhillon, a longtime Republican election lawyer and former vice chair of the California GOP, in December 2024, and she was sworn in in April 2025 after Senate confirmation. "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 turned toward fighting diversity, equity and inclusion policies, antisemitism on campus, alleged anti-Christian bias and transgender participation in women's sports. It sued Harvard and UCLA over alleged campus antisemitism, NPR reported. It also dropped two pending police consent decrees in Minneapolis and Louisville and dismissed more than 50 decades-old desegregation decrees with public schools, according to CBS News. Roughly 300 attorneys left during her tenure, according to NPR; Dhillon told Fox she recruited more than 130.
Her voting rights push drew the most scrutiny. The division filed 31 lawsuits, mostly against Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, seeking unredacted voter rolls, and has lost 27 of them, according to CBS. For Tuesday's election it sent more than 1,000 monitors to polling sites, a record. The division also drew criticism for not opening criminal civil rights investigations after immigration agents fatally shot U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year.
"Decimated" or "done"
Critics were blunt. "Harmeet Dhillon has been the most destructive, lawless, and hateful head of the Civil Rights Division in DOJ history," said Stacey Young, a former division lawyer who leads the alumni group Justice Connection. Kristen Clarke, who ran the division under President Joe Biden and is now general counsel at the NAACP, said Dhillon "abandoned cases, purged the work force and weaponized the division," the Guardian reported.
Dhillon sees it differently. "We changed it, and that's what we came here to do. And it's done," she told Fox. She was scheduled to speak Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Committee's retreat and gala at Mar-a-Lago, NBC News reported.
Photos: Clash Report / X; U.S. Department of Justice; Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
