Harmeet Dhillon, controversial head of Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, resigns

Washington — Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, resigned 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 over the past 18 months,” Blanche wrote in an article on

Dhillon oversaw a mass exodus from the Civil Rights Division last year, with more than 75 percent of his staff leaving. It upended many of the division’s traditional priorities, focused on combating discrimination against some of the country’s most vulnerable and historically marginalized groups.

Since taking the helm of the division, often considered the “jewel” of the Justice Department, she has reoriented it to focus on other priorities, including protecting the rights of gun owners, limiting the use of equity, diversity and inclusion policies at universities, and adopting legal positions that oppose protecting the civil rights of transgender people.

During his tenure, the Justice Department closed many of its cases involving discrimination targeting Black Americans and announced that it had thrown out more than 50 decades-old consent decrees with public schools, including many in the Deep South, that were in place to protect Black students from unlawful discrimination.

Dhillon last year overturned two pending consent decrees with the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments regarding systemic abuses that were investigated following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and overturned investigation findings into misconduct at six other police departments.

Earlier this year, after immigration agents fatally shot U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis as they protested the administration’s immigration crackdown, the Civil Rights Division made no move to open a criminal civil rights investigation, in violation of longstanding practice regarding such high-profile officer-involved shootings.

The division ultimately became involved in the Pretti case after the Justice Department faced intense criticism and questions about why Homeland Security Investigations — and not the FBI — was leading the investigation into its own agency.

To date, no charges have been filed in the Pretti case, which is also the subject of a separate investigation by state authorities.

Stacey Young, a former Civil Rights Division attorney who founded the nonprofit advocacy group Justice Connection, called Dhillon “the most destructive, lawless and hateful leader of the Civil Rights Division in DOJ history” in a statement released Thursday.

“Americans’ civil rights do not self-enforce. For nearly 70 years, the Civil Rights Division pushed through 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 used X to post her own videos about the work her division was undertaking. She acknowledged in media interviews that she often generated ideas for civil rights investigations based on various posts she came across on social media.

She has sometimes announced the opening of civil rights investigations online, which is a radical departure from historical practice. She also distributed challenge coins to other DOJ attorneys with the term “FAFO” (“f*** around and find out”) printed on them.

One of the areas in which she has been most vocal is that of voting rights.

Under his leadership, the Civil Rights Division filed 31 lawsuits against mostly blue states and the District of Columbia in an effort to access unredacted voter rolls.

Attorneys for the division have repeatedly argued that they need the information to ensure states comply with two federal election laws that require them to maintain clean voter rolls. However, they later admitted in court that the Justice Department intended to share this information with the Department of Homeland Security so it could use it for criminal enforcement and immigration purposes.

So far, the Justice Department has lost 27 of these cases.

During Tuesday’s midterm elections, the Civil Rights Division sent more than 1,000 observers to polling places across the country, a record number that forced the Justice Department to solicit volunteers from unusual areas of the DOJ, including the Bureau of Prisons and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

However, in recent weeks, Dhillon has been significantly less involved in this effort.

She did not show up for a briefing on election integrity at the DOJ for journalists, and the assistant attorney general’s office, which does not have civil rights oversight authority, solicited volunteers to observe the election, according to a Sept. 10 memo seen by CBS News. Historically, this program is administered directly by the Civil Rights Division.

A senior Justice Department official denied that election integrity work had been taken away from Dhillon when asked at the briefing, saying the department was spreading resources because of the increased workload.

“I don’t agree that Harmeet lost anything. I think she is as busy as all of us. We distribute wealth,” the official said.