The Civil Rights Division chief is the first senior official to leave the Trump administration since Democrats won Congress
Harmeet Dhillon resigned Thursday as head of the Justice Department‘s Civil Rights Division, ending 18 months in which she steered the unit toward fights over DEI, voter rolls and campus antisemitism, NPR reported. She is the first senior official to leave the Trump administration since the midterms.
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the departure on X, after Democrats’ midterm wins on Tuesday gave the party control of the House and Senate. Dhillon said her work was finished. “We changed it, and that’s what we came here to do. And it’s done,” she told Fox News Digital.
Why Dhillon Says She Is Leaving
“Today, I accepted the resignation of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who led the Civil Rights Division with conviction the past 18 months,” Blanche wrote, CBS News reported.
In her own post on X, Dhillon called the job “the honor of a lifetime.” She added: “We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women and girls’ sports, and so much more,” according to CNN.
She told Fox the decision was her own. “I wasn’t asked to resign,” Dhillon said. “I resigned three weeks ago, and Susie asked me to please wait until after the midterms.”
That was White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. In her resignation letter, seen by CBS, Dhillon said she told Wiles in early October that she would step down after the election. She has said she wants to return to private practice.
Two sources gave CBS a different account: that President Donald Trump demanded she be fired after her Oct. 18 interview on 60 Minutes about election integrity, and that Justice Department officials stalled until the vote was over. Dhillon rejects that. “My decision, my choice,” she told Fox.
Court Losses and a Shrinking Role
Sources told ABC News her exit was long expected after Trump privately expressed frustration over the division’s court losses. CNN reported that her control of the division had been declining for months.
In the weeks before the election, she appeared sidelined. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, not Dhillon, signed the highest-profile election lawsuits, CNN reported. The deputy attorney general’s office also recruited election monitor volunteers, a program the division historically ran, according to CBS.
“Where’s Harmeet?” one GOP official working on those cases asked, CNN reported.
DEI, Antisemitism and Religious Liberty
The Civil Rights Division was created about 70 years ago, during the civil rights movement. Dhillon made clear she saw its job differently.
“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, the division went after diversity, equity and inclusion policies at universities, and accused universities and law schools of discriminating against white and Asian students. It sued UCLA and Harvard for allegedly allowing antisemitism on campus, though CNN reported such efforts rarely produced a court win.
Religious discrimination became a priority, including what NPR called purported anti-Christian bias. Citing Bloomberg, HuffPost reported that hate crime prosecutions fell over the past year while cases involving violence at places of worship rose.
The division also sued Minnesota and California over transgender athletes in girls’ sports and took legal positions against civil rights protections for transgender people. She opened a section dedicated to the Second Amendment, announced some investigations on social media and handed out FAFO challenge coins, CBS reported.
Voter Rolls and Election Monitors
Citing Trump’s claims of voter fraud, it sued dozens of states for their voter rolls. Courts rejected the lawsuits.
CBS counts 31 such suits, mostly against Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, and says the department has lost 27. Division lawyers later admitted in court that the data was to be shared with the Department of Homeland Security for criminal and immigration enforcement, CBS reported.
On Election Day, the division sent more than 1,000 monitors to polling sites, a record, according to CBS.
Police Decrees and a Staff Exodus
Dhillon dropped pending consent decrees with the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments, reached after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and rescinded misconduct findings against six other departments. The department also dismissed more than 50 decades-old consent decrees with public schools, many in the Deep South, that protected Black students, CBS reported.
After immigration agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the division did not open criminal civil rights investigations. It later joined the Pretti case, in which no charges have been filed.
Most of the staff left. More than 75% of the division’s employees departed during her tenure, according to CBS, roughly 300 career attorneys by NPR’s count. Dhillon told Fox she recruited more than 130 lawyers.
Who Could Follow Her Out
Dhillon’s exit comes as the White House braces for more. A senior White House official told Reuters that aides were preparing for staff departures and possible Cabinet changes, FOX Television Stations reported.
Trump has played that down. “Had nothing to do with my Cabinet,” he told Fox News of the losses, Newsmax reported. CBS reported that Trump asked advisers whether War Secretary Pete Hegseth should stay, though White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Trump “has full confidence in Secretary Hegseth.”
Republican strategist John Feehery told Reuters: “He needs to clean house.”
Asked whether she would testify if Congress subpoenaed her, Dhillon said executive privilege would limit what she could discuss. “I would certainly take legal counsel and follow it in that regard,” she told Fox. On a possible pardon, she said: “I have done nothing, in my opinion, that would require that.”
Supporters and Critics React
Blanche praised her record. “She has defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor,” he wrote. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said the White House is “very grateful for her dedicated service at the Department of Justice.”
Critics welcomed the news. “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 attorney who now leads the group Justice Connection.
“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,” Young said.
Kristen Clarke, NAACP general counsel and head of the division under President Joe Biden, said in a statement that Dhillon “abdicated her responsibility to enforce our nation’s federal civil rights laws and destroyed the crown jewel of the Justice Department.”
Featured image from: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons