Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, is stepping down after roughly 18 turbulent months in charge, a tenure in which she overhauled the unit's mission, presided over a mass departure of career employees and forcefully advanced President Trump's agenda.
She is the first senior department official to leave the Trump administration since Democrats regained control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections.
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the resignation in a statement on X and thanked Dhillon for her service. "She has defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor," he wrote, adding that the department was grateful for her work and wished her success going forward.
In her own statement, Dhillon called the job "the honor of a lifetime," citing what she described as the downfall of illegal DEI and efforts to protect women in girls' sports, among other accomplishments.
Dhillon, a conservative attorney and Trump loyalist, transformed a division created some 70 years ago during the civil rights movement to fight racial segregation. During her time in office, about 300 career attorneys were pushed out and replaced with inexperienced ideological allies, while the division's enforcement powers were used to pursue the president's MAGA policies.
She argued that the division had narrowed its mission in recent decades to protecting only the rights of people of color, and she shifted it toward conservative priorities. "We don't just slow down the woke," she told a Federalist Society event in 2025. "We take up the cause to achieve the executive branch's goals."
Under her leadership, the division focused on enforcing Trump's executive orders, including ending alleged radical indoctrination in schools, defending women from what the administration called gender ideology extremism, and combatting antisemitism and purported anti-Christian bias. Ahead of the midterms, it also sued dozens of states to demand voter information in support of Trump's fraud allegations, though election officials resisted and courts threw out the lawsuits.
The division additionally accused numerous universities and law schools of discriminating against white and Asian students, and sued UCLA and Harvard over claims they allowed antisemitism to flourish on campus.
In an email to staff obtained by NPR, Dhillon said she told Trump in early October that she intended to return to private practice after the midterms. "I'm proud of all we've accomplished during this time to ensure our nation's civil rights laws protect every American," she wrote, thanking division and department employees for their work.
Veterans of the division who criticized her treatment of career staff and her enforcement agenda 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 Justice Connection, an alumni group that supports department employees. Young said Dhillon used the department's power to threaten universities, state and local officials and election workers in cases that rarely succeeded in court, and that she decimated a division that spent almost 70 years turning civil rights laws into reality.
