Harmeet Dhillon, the US Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights and a leading figure in the Trump administration’s crackdown on anti-Israel campus protests, has resigned. Her departure is among several resignations of senior department officials announced this week by Attorney General Todd Blanche, who previously served as a personal lawyer for Trump.
Blanche said on Thursday that he had accepted Dhillon’s resignation. Her resignation letter, as cited by US media outlets, said she had submitted it in October and had agreed to continue serving through the election. That account places the submission of her resignation before this week’s midterm elections, in which Trump’s Republican Party suffered heavy defeats.
During her 19 months in the role, Dhillon helped direct the administration’s campaign against universities over student-led pro-Palestinian activism and campus demonstrations. According to Democracy Now, the campaign targeted dozens of universities across the country. Her involvement made her one of the department’s leading officials in its efforts to crack down on those protests.
Democracy Now also reported that Dhillon’s tenure weakened civil rights protections in education, along with protections related to diversity, equity and inclusion. The outlet said the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, under her leadership, ceased investigating allegations of systemic racism and sexism. Those changes formed part of its account of her time overseeing the division.
Dhillon was also directly involved in attempts to secure voter registration lists from roughly 30 states before the midterm vote. Those efforts were unsuccessful. The attempts to obtain the lists took place ahead of the same election through which she had agreed to remain in her post, according to the account in her resignation letter.
On Friday, Blanche announced two further departures: John Eisenberg, the assistant attorney general for national security, and Jason Reding Quinones, the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida. Quinones had overseen an investigation into former intelligence officials whom Trump accused of trying to remove him from power.
The resignations come amid the Justice Department’s pursuit, under Trump, of cases against a number of perceived opponents. Several prosecutors have lost their positions because they were reluctant to bring charges or were unable to do so.
