Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, has resigned after 18 months in the role, Attorney General Todd Blanche announced.
Dhillon is the first senior Justice Department official to leave the Trump administration since Democrats retook control of both the House and Senate in the midterm elections.
Blanche announced the departure on X. "Today, I accepted the resignation of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who led the Civil Rights Division with conviction the past 18 months. 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," he wrote.
During her tenure, Dhillon pushed out roughly 300 attorneys from the division and replaced them with what critics described as inexperienced ideological allies. She redirected the division's enforcement powers toward advancing the Trump administration's priorities.
The Civil Rights Division was established approximately 70 years ago during the movement to end racial segregation in the United States. For decades, it worked to protect the constitutional rights of Americans across areas including housing, employment, education, and policing.
Dhillon, a conservative attorney and Trump loyalist, entered office arguing the division had focused too narrowly on protecting the rights of people of color. She moved quickly to shift its focus toward conservative priorities.
"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 in areas including what the administration described as combating radical indoctrination in schools, defending women from what it called gender ideology extremism, and addressing antisemitism and alleged anti-Christian bias.
In the lead-up to the midterm elections, the Civil Rights Division sued dozens of states demanding voter information, citing the administration's claims of voter fraud. Election officials challenged the lawsuits, and courts dismissed them.
The division also accused multiple universities and law schools of discriminating against white and Asian students, and filed suits against UCLA and Harvard over allegations of allowing antisemitism on campus.
Former division attorneys have sharply criticized Dhillon's record. Stacey Young, a former division attorney who now leads Justice Connection, a group of department alumni supporting current DOJ 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."
Young 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."
