Harmeet Dhillon, who led the Justice Department‘s Civil Rights Division for 18 tumultuous months, resigned on Thursday — the first senior Trump administration official to depart since Democrats swept both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections.
Key Points
- Attorney General Todd Blanche announced on Thursday that he had accepted Dhillon’s resignation.
- Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights since April 2025, said she had decided to leave weeks before the election and stayed on at the White House’s request.
- She plans to return to private legal practice.
- More than three-quarters of the division’s career staff have left since the start of President Donald Trump‘s second term.
Dhillon told Fox News Digital that she formally submitted her resignation on November 5, but had informed White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in early October that she planned to step down after the midterms. “I wasn’t asked to resign,” she said. “I resigned three weeks ago, and Susie asked me to please wait until after the midterms.”
In a text message to USA Today, Dhillon cited a gruelling schedule following the deaths of her husband and her father in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Blanche praised her in a post on X, saying she had “led the Civil Rights Division with conviction” and “defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favour.”
A division remade
Under Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division was radically reshaped. The Trump administration cleared out most of its career lawyers, and Dhillon redirected its work toward the president’s agenda: investigations into university diversity policies and campus antisemitism, protections for religious liberty, ending what her resignation letter called “unlawful and discriminatory DEI practices at major institutions”, and lawsuits to protect women’s and girls’ sports, including cases against Minnesota and California.
The division also dropped proposed agreements that would have put police reforms in Louisville and Minneapolis under court supervision, and it ran the largest election-monitoring effort in the department’s history during the 2026 midterm elections — an operation that became the focus of a CBS News “60 Minutes” report on October 18.
Critics were unsparing. Kristen Clarke, the NAACP’s general counsel and a former head of the Civil Rights Division, accused Dhillon of walking away from major civil rights cases. The NAACP urged her successor to enforce federal civil rights laws fairly.
What happens next
Dhillon’s departure comes as the administration prepares for a flurry of congressional investigations — including into shootings by immigration agents and the Jeffrey Epstein files — once Democrats take control of the House and Senate committees next year. Whoever succeeds her will inherit a division that is smaller, more politicised and far more scrutinised than the one she took over in April 2025.
Sources: USA Today — https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/11/05/harmeet-dhillon-justice-department-resignation/92627113007/ ; Al Jazeera — https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/11/5/top-us-civil-rights-official-resigns