Harmeet Dhillon reshaped DOJ Civil Rights Division, ousting roughly 300 attorneys

Enforcement shifted to Trump’s agenda through lawsuits against states and universities

Harmeet Dhillon pushed out roughly 300 attorneys from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and replaced them with inexperienced ideological allies during an 18-month tenure NPR described as tumultuous, according to its report. Under her leadership, the division also used its enforcement powers to advance President Trump’s MAGA agenda. Attorney General Todd Blanche said Nov. 5, 2026, that he had accepted her resignation.

Blanche announced the 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. NPR reported that Dhillon was the first senior department official to depart the Trump administration since Democrats retook control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections.

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 United States. 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 of the division’s mission, NPR reported. 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,” Dhillon said at a Federalist Society event in 2025. “We take up the cause to achieve the executive branch’s goals.”

Under her leadership, NPR reported, 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. According to NPR’s report, a judge dismissed the Trump administration’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard.

Many Civil Rights Division veterans criticized Dhillon’s view of the unit and its mission. Stacey Young, a former division attorney who now heads Justice Connection, a group of department alumni that provides support to Justice Department employees, was among the critics.

“Harmeet Dhillon has been the most destructive, lawless, and hateful head of the Civil Rights Division in DOJ history,” Young said. “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,” she said.