Head of Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division resigns

(CBS NEWS) — Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, resigned on 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 the past 18 months,” Blanche wrote in a post on X. “She has 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 every success in her future endeavors.”

Dhillon oversaw a mass exodus from the Civil Rights Division last year, with more than 75% of its staff departing. She overhauled a division that had long prioritized fighting discrimination against some of the nation’s most vulnerable and historically marginalized groups.

Since taking over the division, often lauded as being the “crown jewel” of the DOJ, she has reoriented it to focus instead on other priorities that have included protecting gun owners’ rights, curbing the use of equity, diversity and inclusion policies at universities, and adopting legal positions that oppose civil rights protections for transgender people.

In her resignation letter to President Trump, which was seen by CBS News, Dhillon said that she told White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in early October that she intended to step down after the midterm elections.

Two sources familiar with the matter, however, told CBS News that Trump demanded she be fired after he watched her Oct. 18 appearance on “60 Minutes” discussing the government’s election integrity efforts.

In that interview, Dhillon touted the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute noncitizens who unlawfully voted in prior elections, noting that the Biden administration had only prosecuted 13 people while the Trump investigation was investigating “thousands” of such cases.

In her resignation letter, Dhillon touted her efforts to end “unlawful and discriminatory DEI practices” and to protect “women and girls’ sports from biological males, including through lawsuits against Minnesota and California,” among other accomplishments.

“While I am leaving this post, I will continue fighting for our country in the years ahead,” she added.

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

Dhillon nixed two pending consent decrees last year with the Minneapolis and Louisville Police Departments over systemic abuses that were investigated in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and rescinded the investigative findings of misconduct into six other police departments.

Earlier this year, after immigration agents shot and killed American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis as they were protesting the administration’s immigration crackdown, the Civil Rights Division did not move to open any criminal civil rights investigations, in violation of longstanding practice for such high-profile officer-involved shootings.

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

To date, no charges have been filed in the Pretti case, which is also separately under investigation by state officials.