WASHINGTON (AP) — Conservative attorney Harmeet Dhillon said Thursday she has resigned from her position. She oversaw a sweeping reorganization of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, celebrated a mass exodus of career lawyers and spearheaded a sweeping investigation into elite universities.
Dillon has been a powerful and divisive figure within President Donald Trump’s Justice Department since she was appointed assistant attorney general last year, dramatically changing the direction of a department created to protect minority rights during the U.S. civil rights movement.
“We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women and girls in sports and more,” Dillon said in a social media post announcing her departure, using the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion. She called taking on the role “the honor of a lifetime.”
Although Dillon announced her resignation after the midterm elections, in which Democrats swept the House and Senate in a stunning rebuke of Trump, Dillon said in a Fox News Digital interview that she made the decision to leave her post weeks ago but was asked by the White House to stay on until after the election. She said she wanted to return to the private sector but was not asked to resign.
“My decision, my choice,” she said.
As leader of the department, Dillon came under harsh criticism from former Justice Department lawyers who accused her of abandoning her traditional civil rights enforcement mission in favor of conservative causes. By the start of Trump’s second term, more than three-quarters of the department’s staff had left — a move Dillon called “the largest single-person purge in the history of the Department of Justice.”
She accused the previous administration of pushing a misguided liberal agenda and welcomed the departures of lawyers who didn’t align with the Trump administration’s priorities, telling conservative pundit Glenn Beck in an interview last year that “the job here is to enforce federal civil rights laws, not to awaken an ideology.”
During her tenure, the civil rights division quashed police reform settlements and investigations and launched investigations into colleges the Trump administration believed improperly prioritized diversity and inclusion, discriminated against white applicants in the admissions process and failed to combat anti-Semitism on campus.
Her pressure campaign on the school resulted in multiple settlements, including one that led to the resignation of the University of Virginia president. She has also led efforts to pressure states to turn over detailed voter records, despite repeatedly losing in court.
Attorney General Todd Branch wrote in a social media post announcing Dillon’s departure that she led the department with “conviction” and “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 success in her future endeavors,” Branch wrote.
But Stacey Young, a former Civil Rights Division attorney who now heads the Justice Department’s alumni network, called her the “most destructive, lawless, and hateful” Civil Rights Division director in the Justice Department’s history.
“Americans’ civil rights do not enforce themselves. For nearly 70 years, the Civil Rights Department has delivered on the civil rights laws Americans have demanded,” Yang said in an emailed statement Thursday. “Dillon destroyed it.”
Dhillon, who was born in India and immigrated to the United States as a child with a Sikh family, was a well-known figure in conservative legal and political circles long before she was appointed to the Justice Department.
As a California attorney, she has been involved in many high-profile causes and legal battles, including challenging the state’s stay-at-home order during the coronavirus pandemic and filing lawsuits alleging the state failed to verify citizenship for voter registrations.
She launched a bid for Republican National Committee chair but lost to Ronna McDaniel in a January 2023 race that exposed bitter internal divisions within the party.
Dillon and her law firm are also representing Trump himself, who has been subpoenaed to testify by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The group eventually abandoned the effort and concluded its work without forcing the issue, prompting Dhillon to boast on social media platform X that the committee had “waved the white flag.”
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