The head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, is out after 18 tumultuous months in charge, during which she radically reshaped the unit's mission, oversaw the mass exodus of career staff and aggressively pursued President Trump's agenda.
Dhillon is the first senior department official to depart the Trump administration since Democrats retook control of the House and Senate in midterm elections.
Attorney General Todd Blanche, in a statement on X, announced Dhillon's resignation and thanked her for her service.
"She has defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor," he wrote. "The Department is grateful for her dedicated public service, and we wish her every success in her future endeavors."
In her own statement, Dhillon said the job had been "the honor of a lifetime."
"We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women in girls' sports, and so much more," she added.
During her tenure, Dhillion implemented dramatic changes in the Civil Rights Division, pushing out roughly 300 career attorneys, hiring inexperienced ideological allies to replace them and using the division's enforcement powers to advance President Trump's MAGA policies.
The changes marked a dramatic shift for the division, which was created some 70 years ago during the civil rights movement to end racial segregation in the U.S. For decades, it fought to protect the constitutional rights of all Americans across all aspects of life, from housing and employment to education and policing.
Dhillon, a conservative attorney and Trump loyalist, came into office with a different view. In her eyes, the division had narrowed its mission in recent decades to only protecting the rights of people of color, and she promptly shifted to aggressively pursuing 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 redirected its energies to enforce Trump's executive orders, including ending the alleged radical indoctrination in schools, defending women from "gender ideology extremism," and combatting antisemitism and purported anti-Christian bias.
In the run-up to the midterm elections, the Civil Rights Division sued dozens of states demanding they turn over voter information—in furtherance of Trump's allegations of voter fraud.
Election officials pushed back, and courts tossed the department's lawsuits.
The division also accused numerous universities and law schools of discriminating against white and Asian students, and sued UCLA and Harvard for allegedly allowing antisemitism to flourish on campus.
In an email to division staff, Dhillon said she informed Trump in early October that she planned to return to private practice after the midterms, and now is the time to do so.
"I'm proud of all we've accomplished during this time to ensure our nation's civil rights laws protect every American," she wrote in the email, a copy of which was obtained by NPR. "I'm also grateful for the hard work of the dedicated employees within the Division and the rest of the Department of Justice."
For many division veterans who were highly critical of Dhillon's treatment of career staff and her enforcement goals, her departure was a welcome development.
"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. "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."
"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," said Young, who now heads who Justice Connection, a group of department alumni that provides support to DOJ employees.
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