Harmeet Dhillon resigns as Justice Department civil rights chief after Republican midterm losses

Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who has run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, resigned on Thursday, Attorney General Todd Blanche announced on X. She is the first senior department official to leave since Democrats won control of Congress in this week’s midterm elections, according to Axios and The Guardian.

Blanche said he had accepted the resignation and credited Dhillon with defending Americans’ civil liberties “without fear or favor.” The Guardian noted that Bloomberg Law was first to report her exit.

Her account of the decision

Dhillon told Fox News Digital that nobody pushed her out. She said she informed White House chief of staff Susie Wiles three weeks before Election Day that she believed her work was finished and that she wanted to return to private practice. According to Fox News, Wiles asked her to hold off until the vote had passed. A resignation letter dated November 5 was obtained by the network.

“My decision, my choice. It’s time,” Dhillon said. Fox News reported that she moved to Washington to serve after the deaths of her husband and father. Trump nominated her in December 2024, and the Senate confirmed her in April 2025.

Asked whether she would testify if Congress subpoenaed her, she said executive privilege would restrict what she could discuss, but that she would take legal advice and follow it. On whether Trump might pardon officials targeted by Democrats, she said she had never raised the matter with him.

A remade division

Fox News described a tenure of roughly 19 months in which she shifted the division’s focus to DEI and race-conscious policies, religious discrimination, transgender athletes in women’s sports, gun rights and election integrity. The same account said about 300 attorneys left the division during Trump’s second term, while Dhillon said she hired more than 130 lawyers.

The Guardian reported that the division abandoned many cases involving discrimination against minorities in areas such as voting, housing, employment and schooling. It also pursued universities over admissions and antisemitism claims. The paper said a whistleblower alleged that some of those inquiries had a predetermined result.

The division suffered notable courtroom setbacks as well. According to the Guardian, it sued more than two dozen states seeking voter-roll data and lost every case, with several of the rulings coming from judges Trump had appointed. Axios added that Dhillon led the department’s first-ever effort to monitor midterm voting in all 50 states, deploying about 1,000 monitors.

Reaction and what comes next

Critics were harsh. Kristen Clarke, who led the division under Joe Biden and now serves as the NAACP’s general counsel, said Dhillon had “destroyed the crown jewel” of the department. Stacey Young, a former division lawyer who heads the group Justice Connection, said more than three-quarters of its lawyers had left.

Supporters had argued when she was nominated that she would correct a division they saw as ideologically skewed. “We changed it, and that’s what we came here to do,” Dhillon told Fox News.

The Guardian said Democrats are expected to use their new majority to investigate executive agencies, the Justice Department among them. Axios said it was unclear whether more top officials would leave during the lame-duck period. No successor had been named in the reports.