WASHINGTON — Harmeet Dhillon, the Republican lawyer who oversaw a massive overhaul of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, submitted her resignation Thursday.
Attorney General Todd Blanche posted on X that he had accepted Dhillon’s resignation. He wrote that she “defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor” and that the DOJ “is grateful for her dedicated public service, and we wish her every success in her future endeavors.”
Dhillon posted on X on Thursday that the job had been “the honor of his life.”
“We marked the beginning of the downfall of illegal DEI, fought to protect women’s and women’s sports, and so much more,” she wrote.
The departure of Dhillon, who had long worked as an election lawyer for the GOP, comes just two days after Democrats took control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections.
Under Dhillon’s leadership, the Civil Rights Division led some of the Trump administration’s most controversial legal maneuvers, including lawsuits alleging discrimination at elite universities. The division declined to open a use-of-force investigation into the ICE officer who fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota earlier this year.
His office also filed lawsuits against 30 states and Washington, D.C., seeking to obtain state voter rolls in the months leading up to the election, with federal judges throwing out 27 of those cases. Dhillon was a regular presence in conservative media in the run-up to Tuesday’s election, promoting the work of the Civil Rights Division.
Dhillon is scheduled to speak Thursday at the Donald Trump Ballroom at the Mar-a-Lago Club at the Conservative Political Action Committee Retreat and Gala.
Bloomberg Law first announced his resignation plans.
Dhillon’s office recently attempted to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump administration official who testified before the House committee on Jan. 6 about Trump’s actions during the Capitol siege.
His office also filed a criminal case against former CNN reporter Don Lemon and against protesters at a Minnesota church protest, under a law historically used to protect reproductive rights establishments.
Stacey Young, executive director of the group Justice Connection, called Dhillon “the most destructive, lawless and hateful head of the Civil Rights Division in the history of the Justice Department,” and said in a statement that she “exercised the enormous power of the Justice Department to threaten universities, state and local officials, and election workers in bogus cases that have rarely won in court.”
Dhillon has “decimated” the Civil Rights Division, Young said, and called on the new Senate “to exercise all of its powers of advice and consent to ensure that the next assistant attorney general fulfills the division’s congressional mandate to uphold the civil rights of all Americans diligently and fairly.”
Kristen Clarke, general counsel for the NAACP and former head of the Civil Rights Division under the Biden administration, said Dhillon “abdicated his responsibility to enforce our nation’s federal civil rights laws and destroyed the crown jewel of the Justice Department.”
Clarke said in a statement that Dhillon “abandoned cases, purged staff and weaponized the Division to target institutions to achieve illegitimate and partisan goals” and that the NAACP would demand that his replacement “respect the sacred mission of the agency, enforce the law fairly and protect our civil rights.”
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