Washington — Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, resigned on Thursday, Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
“Today, I accepted the resignation of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who led the Civil Rights Division with conviction the past 18 months,” Blanche wrote in a post on X. “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.”
Dhillon oversaw a mass exodus from the Civil Rights Division last year, with more than 75% of its staff departing. She overhauled a division that had long prioritized fighting discrimination against some of the nation’s most vulnerable and historically marginalized groups.
Since taking over the division, often lauded as being the “crown jewel” of the DOJ, she has reoriented it to focus instead on other priorities that have included protecting gun owners’ rights, curbing the use of equity, diversity and inclusion policies at universities, and adopting legal positions that oppose civil rights protections for transgender people.
In her resignation letter to President Trump, which was seen by CBS News, Dhillon said that she told White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in early October that she intended to step down after the midterm elections.
Two sources familiar with the matter, however, told CBS News that Mr. Trump demanded she be fired after he watched her Oct. 18 appearance on “60 Minutes” discussing the government’s election integrity efforts.
In that interview, Dhillon touted the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute noncitizens who unlawfully voted in prior elections, noting that the Biden administration had only prosecuted 13 people while the Trump investigation was investigating “thousands” of such cases.
One of the sources said Mr. Trump felt that Dhillon should have been more forceful in her explanation.
Despite the president’s demands, Justice Department officials were able to stall for time and allow her to proceed with her plans to resign after the election was over, the sources added.
In a statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said that Dhillon did a “fantastic job” in her role and the White House is “very grateful for her dedicated service at the Department of Justice.”
Dhillon’s tenure
Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images 
In her resignation letter, Dhillon touted her efforts to end “unlawful and discriminatory DEI practices” and to protect “women and girls’ sports from biological males, including through lawsuits against Minnesota and California,” among other accomplishments.
“While I am leaving this post, I will continue fighting for our country in the years ahead,” she added.
During her tenure, the Justice Department closed many of its cases involving discrimination targeting Black Americans and announced it had dismissed more than 50 decades-old consent decrees with public schools, many in the Deep South, that were in place to protect Black students from unlawful discrimination.
Dhillon nixed two pending consent decrees last year with the Minneapolis and Louisville Police Departments over systemic abuses that were investigated in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and rescinded the investigative findings of misconduct into six other police departments.
Earlier this year, after immigration agents shot and killed American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis as they were protesting the administration’s immigration crackdown, the Civil Rights Division did not move to open any criminal civil rights investigations, in violation of longstanding practice for such high-profile officer-involved shootings.
The division ultimately got involved in the Pretti case after the Justice Department faced staunch criticism and questions about why Homeland Security Investigations — and not the FBI — was leading the probe into its own agency.
To date, no charges have been filed in the Pretti case, which is also separately under investigation by state officials.
Stacey Young, a former Civil Rights Division attorney who founded the nonprofit advocacy group Justice Connection, called Dhillon “the most destructive, lawless, and hateful head of the Civil Rights Division in DOJ history” in a statement on Thursday.
“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.”
Dhillon, a staunch ally of President Trump who for years ran her own law firm in San Francisco, is a frequent guest on conservative podcasts and a very active poster on social media.
Unlike her predecessors, she frequently took to X to post videos about the work that her division was undertaking. She acknowledged in media interviews that she often generated ideas for civil rights investigations based on various posts she encountered on social media.
She has sometimes announced the opening of civil rights investigations online, a stark departure from historical practice. She also handed out challenge coins to fellow DOJ attorneys with the term “FAFO” (“f–k around and find out”) printed on them.
Among the areas where she has been the most vocal has involved voting rights issues.
Under her leadership, the Civil Rights Division filed 31 lawsuits against primarily blue states and the District of Columbia in an effort to gain access to unredacted voter rolls.
Lawyers from the division repeatedly argued that they needed the information to ensure states were complying with two federal voting laws that require them to maintain clean voter lists. However, they later admitted in court that the Justice Department intended to share the information with the Department of Homeland Security so they could use it for criminal and immigration enforcement purposes.
So far, the Justice Department has lost 27 of those cases.
During the midterm elections on Tuesday, the Civil Rights Division sent out more than 1,000 monitors to polling sites across the country, a record number that required the Justice Department to solicit volunteers from unusual parts of the DOJ, including the Bureau of Prisons and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
However, in more recent weeks, Dhillon has been noticeably less involved in the effort.
She did not appear at an election integrity briefing that was held at DOJ for journalists, and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, who does not have oversight authority on civil rights, solicited election monitor volunteers, according to a Sept. 10 memo seen by CBS News. That program has historically been run by the Civil Rights Division.
A senior Justice Department official denied that the election integrity work had been taken away from Dhillon when asked about it directly at the briefing, saying they were spreading around resources due to the increase in the workload.
“I don’t agree that anything has shifted away from Harmeet. I think she’s as busy as the rest of us. We’re spreading the wealth,” the said.
