Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, accompanied by her aides, speaks during a news conference at the Justice Department on September 29, 2025 in Washington, DC. Dhillon resigned on Thursday. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images North America hide caption
The head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, is out after 18 tumultuous months in charge.
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 announce Dhillon's departure on X.
"Today, I accepted the resignation of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who led the Civil Rights Division with conviction the past 18 months. She has defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor. The Department is grateful for her dedicated public service, and we wish her every success in her future endeavors," he wrote.
During her tenure Dhillion radically reshaped the Civil Rights Division, pushing out roughly 300 attorneys, hiring inexperienced ideological allies to replace them and using the division's enforcement powers to advance President Trump's MAGA agenda.
The changes marked a dramatic shift for the Civil Rights Division, which was created some 70 years ago during the 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 only been 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.
Many Civil Rights Division veterans say Dhillon's view of the unit and its mission is a perversion of
"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.
NPR does not offer or accept money for coverage or interviews. Anyone who makes such an offer or request is not an NPR employee and does not represent NPR.
