Harmeet Dhillon, DOJ's controversial civil rights chief, resigns

Key points

• Harmeet Dhillon resigned Thursday as head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.
• More than 75% of the division's staff departed during her 18 months in charge.
• The division lost 27 of 31 lawsuits seeking access to unredacted voter rolls.

Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who led the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, resigned on Thursday, Attorney General Todd Blanche announced in a post on X. Blanche said he had accepted the resignation of Dhillon, who ran the division for 18 months, and praised her for enforcing the law "without fear or favor."

Dhillon drew controversy for reshaping the division's priorities. More than 75% of its staff left during her tenure, and she shifted its focus toward gun owners' rights, curbing equity, diversity and inclusion policies at universities, and legal positions opposing civil rights protections for transgender people.

Changes to enforcement

Under Dhillon, the Justice Department closed many cases involving discrimination against Black Americans and dismissed more than 50 decades-old consent decrees with public schools, many in the Deep South. She also ended two pending consent decrees with the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments and rescinded misconduct findings against six other departments.

The division did not open criminal civil rights investigations after immigration agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, contrary to longstanding practice. It later became involved in the Pretti case after criticism that Homeland Security Investigations, rather than the FBI, was leading the probe. No charges have been filed in that case.

the most destructive, lawless, and hateful head of the Civil Rights Division in DOJ history

— Stacey Young, former Civil Rights Division attorney

Voting rights lawsuits

On voting rights, the division filed 31 lawsuits against mostly blue states and the District of Columbia seeking unredacted voter rolls. Lawyers later admitted in court that the department intended to share the information with the Department of Homeland Security for criminal and immigration enforcement. The Justice Department has lost 27 of those cases.

During Tuesday's midterm elections, the division sent more than 1,000 monitors to polling sites, a record number that required volunteers from parts of the DOJ including the Bureau of Prisons and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.