Harmeet Dhillon, who oversaw the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has submitted her resignation, according to Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Blanche made the announcement on X after Bloomberg first reported the departure.
“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,” Blanche wrote.
After the Trump administration tapped Dhillon to run the division, she spent months turning it upside down, with insiders describing how she pushed prosecutors out and helped turn the agency into a haven for the president’s MAGA agenda.
Dhillon reportedly told colleagues she would leave the department after the midterms.
Dhillon, once a personal lawyer to Trump, was a vocal supporter of the president’s lie that he won the 2020 election, and when running her private law firm, Dhillon Law Group, she launched litigation against multiple states, trying to overturn existing voter protections as well as get Trump’s name back on the ballot in 2024 after some states disqualified him for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Dhillon is also anti-abortion and has referred to doctors who provide gender-affirming care as “butchers.”
Stacey Young, executive director of Justice Connection, a bipartisan group of former career Justice Department and FBI officials, heralded the resignation on Thursday.
“Harmeet Dhillon has been the most destructive, lawless, and hateful head of the Civil Rights Division in DOJ history,” Young said. “After she upended the division’s mission-critical work, the civil servants who dedicated their careers to protecting vulnerable communities were instead told to target them — and more than three-quarters of the division’s lawyers left.”
Young also slammed Dhillon for her role in failing to open investigations into ICE-related shootings and deaths.
“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,” Young said.
Blanche and Dhillon declined to open a civil probe into the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. Good’s family announced they were suing ICE and other administration officials in October.
Dhillon also oversaw the dismissal of settlements and consent decrees for police reform for police departments in Kentucky and Minnesota after the police killings of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor. The decrees were struck during the Biden administration; under Trump, the DOJ said the agreements were “overbroad” and “anti-police.”
During the midterms, Dhillon’s division made seeking out and prosecuting voter fraud a centerpiece of its agenda and deployed at least 1,000 election monitors to all 50 states on Tuesday. The division also led the charge on nearly two dozen lawsuits attempting to wrest control of the elections from the states to the federal government, including by seizing voting rolls. Those attempts were rejected by the courts.
Additionally, Dhillon championed probes of universities the administration accused of being antisemitic toward Jewish students.
In a statement, Kristen Clarke, general counsel for the NAACP and former assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, said Dhillon had “weaponized the Division to target institutions to achieve illegitimate, partisan goals.”
“As a result, hate crimes, police violence, voter suppression, and discrimination [have] gone unchecked in all corners of the country,” Clarke said.
According to a report published by Bloomberg last month, prosecutions of hate crimes have plummeted in the last year while there has been a significant uptick in prosecutions of cases involving violence at places of worship or the targeting of other religious communities.