Harmeet Dhillon resigns as head of Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Division
Harmeet K. Dhillon, who oversaw the dismantling of the Justice Department’s prestigious Civil Rights Division while leading that unit, resigned Thursday, marking the first major shake-up in the law enforcement agency since Democrats swept the midterm elections on Tuesday and won control of the House and Senate.
During more than 18 months running the division, which was founded in 1957 to combat racial discrimination as part of the Civil Rights Act, Dhillon dramatically transformed the office’s focus and used it to propel President Donald Trump’s agenda.
Hundreds of career staffers fled, amounting to more than half the attorneys in the division, often because they vehemently disagreed with the direction of the office under Dhillon.
Since taking over last year, Dhillon redirected attorneys to focus on combating antisemitism, prosecuting noncitizens who voted, expanding gun rights and taking aim at what Trump and his allies have described as anti-Christian bias and Democrats’ “woke ideology.”
To tackle those priorities, the division focused fewer resources addressing its historic mission of fighting discrimination of minority groups and those most vulnerable in society.
Rather than career attorneys, Dhillon often relied on a small group of political appointees to work on the office’s biggest investigations. Attorneys she recruited often came with conservative credentials, but they sometimes lacked the litigation and government experience of the people they replaced.
In a resignation letter Thursday addressed to Trump, Dhillon wrote that she had informed White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in early October of her intention to leave. She said on social media that serving as the head of the Civil Rights Division was “the honor of a lifetime.”
“We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women and girls’ sports, and so much more,” Dhillon wrote. “I want to thank President Trump for giving me this opportunity. I look forward to what’s next!”
After Trump pushed out Attorney General Pam Bondi in April, Dhillon vied for a more senior position in the Justice Department, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
She did not get that but remained at the agency even as her relationship with top Justice Department officials grew more strained, the people familiar with the department’s internal workings said.
Dhillon is a longtime conservative legal activist who founded her own California-based law firm, Dhillon Law Group, in 2006. The firm has represented clients that sued the government and universities over gun laws, discrimination cases and restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic.
Her partner at that law firm, David Warrington, served as Trump’s White House counsel before leaving the role in September. The firm posted from its social media account Thursday that Dhillon plans to rejoin it.
Attorney General Todd Blanche thanked Dhillon in a message on social media for leading the division with “conviction.”
“She has defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor,” he wrote.
Dhillon’s push to investigate the nation’s elite universities for alleged antisemitism and diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, policies was a defining effort of her tenure.
The high-profile effort did not yield Dhillon any victories in court, but she was able to pressure institutions, including Cornell and the University of Virginia, to reach settlements with the Justice Department that included payouts and commitments to abolish certain DEI practices.
Amid the investigations, University of Virginia President James E. Ryan resigned, saying he did so to try to spare the university a costly fight with the Trump administration.
Dhillon’s office came under fire for declining to thoroughly investigate the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who shot Minnesota protesters Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
While it is difficult to bring civil rights charges against police officers for killing someone, the office has historically been responsible for investigating controversial uses of force and abuses of power by law enforcement officers and agencies.
That marked a complete turnaround from the Biden administration, which had tried to use the Civil Rights Division to reshape law enforcement in cities where high-profile killings by officers ignited widespread outrage.
Under Dhillon, the Justice Department dropped police accountability agreements it had struck during the Biden administration with Minneapolis and Louisville, and retracted its findings that agencies in other cities had violated the Constitution.
“Is Harmeet running from a sinking ship? Trying to avoid actual oversight? Or getting pushed out by DOJ leadership?” said Vanita Gupta, who led the Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration. “Maybe it’s all of the above but regardless, she used the Civil Rights Division against the very communities and values it was founded to protect, and that will be her legacy.”
In the weeks ahead of the midterm elections, Dhillon publicly said that voting by noncitizens was rampant, despite evidence showing that such illegal voting represents an infinitesimal number of ballots cast.
And she became the face of the Trump administration’s unusual effort to obtain state voting rolls as a way to screen for possible noncitizens who cast ballots.
But after Dhillon and her team filed 31 lawsuits to obtain rolls from states that refused to voluntarily hand them over, she lost 27 of them. The remaining four are still pending, and judges have not ruled on them yet.
As Election Day drew near, Dhillon was noticeably absent from much of the department’s high-profile voting litigation, an area her division would typically oversee.
High-profile suits seeking to delay certification of the results in Alaska’s Senate race in the event of a Republican loss and to set aside the ballots of more than 20,000 people in California suspected of being noncitizens were signed by other top department officials.
Asked about Dhillon’s lack of visibility in those legal fights, a senior department official last week denied she had been sidelined.
“We’re all drinking from a fire hose,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel matters. “So we’re spreading our talents and our resources.”
Others pointed to Dhillon’s work spearheading the Civil Rights Division’s deployment of more than 900 election monitors to polling sites across the country on Election Day as a sign of her continued engagement on that front.
As a Justice Department leader, Dhillon had a robust and fierce media presence, regularly posting on social media and appearing on conservative media to defend her agenda.
“I think that’s fine,” Dhillon said on a podcast about the mass departures in her office. “We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute police departments based on statistical evidence or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence.”
She added: “The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws—not woke ideology.”
Dhillon’s supporters lauded the pugilistic style she brought to her job.
From maligning her critics as “hoes” on social media to opening a slew of investigations into issues of interest to conservatives, her supporters say she best embodied the aggressive push for top-to-bottom change that Trump has demanded from his Justice Department.
“Harmeet Dhillon has always served as a bold, fearless, and highly effective warrior for all Americans’ constitutional rights,” Mike Davis, a conservative legal activist and informal adviser to the Trump administration, posted online. “She has made tremendous personal sacrifices for our country, and she deserves our thanks and praise for a job very well done.”
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