By Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff and Andrew Goudsward
WASHINGTON, Nov 5 (Reuters) - US Justice Department official Harmeet Dhillon, who reshaped the agency's civil rights unit to pursue Trump administration priorities including voter data requests and gun rights cases, has resigned, Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Thursday.
Dhillon is among the first senior officials to leave the administration after Tuesday's midterm elections, in which Democrats retook both chambers of Congress.
Dhillon, a Trump ally,
oversaw an overhaul of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which has historically enforced laws protecting voting rights and fighting racial discrimination. Under her leadership, the division shifted focus toward challenging diversity initiatives and investigating antisemitism on college campuses, leading to probes of several elite universities.
The changes prompted a wave of departures among career staff. Dhillon said attorneys in the unit pursued liberal priorities and were unwilling to implement Trump’s agenda.
In a resignation letter, Dhillon cited as accomplishments efforts to force US institutions to scale back diversity initiatives and challenges to school districts over transgender policies. She said she told the White House in October she planned to resign.
"We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women and girls’ sports, and so much more," Dhillon posted on social media, thanking Trump for the appointment.
She will return to her law firm, The Dhillon Law Group, according to her spokesperson. Her firm had recently shrunk as some attorneys left for other practices.
Two people familiar with the matter said Dhillon was frustrated that she had been passed over for promotions in the department and wanted to return to her firm to reinvigorate it.
The Civil Rights Division in prior administrations conducted investigations into police departments accused of systematic civil rights violations, including after high-profile killings of Black people by local police.
“For almost 70 years, the Civil Rights Division brought to fruition the civil rights laws that Americans demanded,” said Stacey Young, the head of Justice Connection, an advocacy group. "Dhillon decimated it."
Dhillon withdrew earlier findings from those police probes and investigated whether some Democratic-led cities violated people’s gun rights under the Second Amendment to the US Constitution.
TARGETING UNIVERSITIES
Dhillon led investigations to pressure dozens of universities she viewed as too liberal. Many of those centered on alleged antisemitism, diversity initiatives, and treatment of transgender people.
Those probes helped the department extract hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement agreements from some of the nation’s premier universities, and even led to the resignation of the president of the University of Virginia. One high-profile target, Harvard University, refused to pay a large settlement and instead has repeatedly fought the Trump administration in court.
Ahead of the midterms, the division played a major role in the Trump administration’s efforts to prevent noncitizens from voting, a phenomenon that independent reviews have found is exceedingly rare. The DOJ lost a series of cases to obtain private voter data from states and deployed about 1,000 staff to monitor polling sites during Tuesday’s vote.
Dhillon has also been involved in cases against perceived Trump enemies.
The civil rights unit brought a high-profile criminal case against former CNN anchor Don Lemon and others accused of disrupting a church service in January to protest the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota.
The division also sought unsuccessfully to bring criminal charges against Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who gave vivid testimony to Congress about Trump’s actions on the day of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
(Reporting by Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff and Andrew Goudsward; editing by Andy Sullivan, Ryan Patrick Jones, Franklin Paul and Sanjeev Miglani)
