One of the first resignations after the midterm elections was that of Harmeet Dhillon. She was the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department. She not only oversaw the major civil rights laws, she also was responsible for those rights that protected students and staff in schools. Trump was trying to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, and wrestling queen Secretary Linda McMahon sent the Department’s Office of Civil Rights to the Justice Department, to be overseen by Harmeet Dhillon.
Dhillon opposes most if not all civil rights laws, as they have been written and interpreted by legislators, judges, juries, lawyers, and citizens. Most people think that civil rights laws are intended to rectify past injustice or to safeguard those whose opportunities have been curtailed by state action or institutions. Dhillon prefers to ignore the history of civil rights in this country and to enforce strict equality, with no preferential treatment for anyone.
Her attention has been laser-focused on voter fraud and elections, supporting Trump’s strong belief that elections are rigged, that undocumented people are casting ballots, and that her office must pursue these crimes.
Jan Resseger, indefatigable champion of the underdog, explains how Dhillon used her position to undermine civil rights laws.
She writes:
Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Justice, resigned on November 5.
President Trump has demanded that Education Secretary Linda McMahon shut down the U.S. Department of Education, and McMahon has distributed much of the work to other departments through “interagency agreements.” In the past six months, after the U.S. Department of Education began collaborating with the Justice Department through an interagency agreement, Harmeet Dhillon had undertaken leadership of much of the work of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
The NY Times‘ Glenn Thrush, Michael Bender, and Alan Feuer describe Dhillon’s resignation this week and her aggressive and twisted approach to civil rights enforcement:
“Harmeet Dhillon, the chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, resigned on Thursday after conflicts with department leaders, including disagreements over legal strategy in the midterm elections… Ms. Dhillon, whose tenure was defined by a successful pressure campaign against universities and unsuccessful efforts to obtain voting data from states had been telling friends for weeks that she planned to step down… In less than two years on the job, Ms. Dhillon repurposed a unit created to address Jim Crow injustices into a battering ram against the left, setting aside its longtime mission of fighting discrimination against Black people to battle campus antisemitism and diversity initiatives… Ms. Dhillon’s hard-line approach, laid out in a series of April 2025 memos declaring her intention to pursue a conservative culture war agenda, prompted the departure of hundreds of career officials in the unit. That left her short-handed to pursue many of her objectives, including the deployment of 1,000 election monitors around the country on Election Day….”
There is no indication that Dhillion’s resignation indicates any change in the civil rights strategy of the Trump administration. Neither does Dhillon’s resignation appear to have been caused by the Democrats’ midterm rout. While her resignation was not announced until November 5, Dhillon had submitted a letter of resignation three weeks prior to last Tuesday’s election, and there is widespread agreement that resigning was her own choice, and not the President’s. In August, the NY Times’ Glenn Thrush and Michael Bender reported: “She has told people in her orbit she may quit if she is not promoted to deputy attorney general, a post vacated by Todd Blanche when he rose to be attorney general—and would only stay if she respects the alternative pick.”
Coverage of Harmeet Dhillon’s policies at the Department of Justice’s civil rights division has addressed a number of urgently important issues. The Washington Post‘s Perry Stein and Jeremy Roebuck track Dhillon’s failure to investigate the ICE practices that included the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. And Democracy Docket‘s Matt Cohen and Yunior Rivas explore the federal investigations and lawsuits that DOJ filed under her leadership to challenge voter registration lists and interfere with the November mid-term election.
However, at the heart of Dhillon’s agenda was the twisted destruction of the federal government’s attempt to protect the educational mission of the Civil Rights Movement, which had sought to end racial segregation in the public schools and address the nation’s appalling educational inequality.
Dhillon’s primary agenda for K-12 public schools was to end the protection of diversity, equity and inclusion for groups of students who had attended segregated schools and whose rights had been violated historically. Dhillon’s agenda for the nation’s colleges and universities similarly sought to impose the Trump administration’s expansive interpretation of the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a case Dhillon and her colleagues have interpreted as not only banning affirmative action, but also as terminating “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies and initiatives across K-12 public schools and higher education.
“Dhillon dramatically transformed the civil rights division in a little over a year and a half,” writes The Guardian’s Sam Levine, “reorienting its mission away from the work it had traditionally done protecting the civil rights of minorities. Under her leadership, the department dropped many cases alleging discrimination against racial minorities in voting, housing, employment and education. Scores of career lawyers also left the division under her leadership, leading to an exodus of expertise of civil rights enforcement.”
In early October, Glenn Thrush elaboratedon the disruptive transformation of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division after Dhillon’s appointment: Dhillon hired “130 lawyers who have recently joined the Justice Department’s short-staffed civil rights division as the Trump administration has struggled to fill the depleted ranks of a unit that was once a magnet for legal talent. Since early 2025, upward of 300 nonpolitical career employees, representing decades of experience, have left the division after its leader, Harmeet Dhillon, repurposed it to pursue President Trump’s agenda. As a consequence, the division has opened its doors to recruits, many of them conservatives, some with education and work histories that might have disqualified them from being hired in the past… Some have left a trail of hyperpartisan, conspiratorial and, in some instances, bizarre statements….”
Harmeet Dhillon’s Impact on Higher Education
Dhillon filed lawsuits threatening federal research grants to universities that she alleged were promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” As reported by Thrush, Bender and Feuer, “In higher education, she mounted repeated challenges to admissions practices and campus speech policies, opening high-profile investigations and lawsuits against elite institutions. She sued Harvard twice, once over accusations of antisemitism and another over claims that the school’s admissions policies discriminated against white and Asian people (she lost both times). She also spoke out in support of parent rights groups, fueling the administration’s push to pare back protections for transgender students… In June 2025, Ms. Dhillon and her team pushed James E. Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia, into early retirement over his reluctance to adopt Mr. Trump’s anti-diversity policies and narrow view of anti-Semitism.” (parenthetical phrase in the original)
Last summer, Bender and Thrush exposed Dhillon‘s proactive strategy for pursuing her agenda: “After being confirmed to lead the civil rights division, Ms. Dhillon perused the U.S. News & World Report rankings of top undergraduate, law school and medical school programs, dispatching demands for admissions data, including applicants’ gender, race and test scores. She concluded that medical schools at U.C.L.A. and Yale were discriminating against white and Asian applicants. (Each school expressed confidence in its admissions practices.) At least 15 other top medical schools are under investigation… Over the past year, she has investigated the University of California system, Arizona State University, George Mason, the City University of New York, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas… Mrs. Dhillon has targeted Harvard University as a prominent part of her battle against liberal academia, but it has the resources and the will to fight back.” (parenthetical phrase in the original)
Harmeet Dhillon’s Impact on K-12 Public Education
Last July, after Education Secretary Linda McMahon transferred some of the responsibility for civil rights enforcement in public schools from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to be housed through an interagency agreement at the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, Education Week’s Alyson Klein explored what the new arrangement would mean:
“Former employees of both agencies… point to big structural differences between the two offices. OCR must consider every complaint it receives and generally seeks an administrative—rather than a legal—resolution whereas the Justice Department more commonly pursues litigation, and does so selectively… What’s more, the shift may give the Trump administration more potent legal tools to investigate and litigate against schools and districts that run afoul of its policies on DEI and transgender students. Earlier this summer, shortly after the transfer was announced, Harmeet Dhillon… told conservative radio host Glenn Beck that her office would pursue legal action to prevent students from having ‘illegal gender ideology… forced down their throats’ without parental permission… In her interview with Beck, Dhillon… also lambasted laws in states like California that she contends give preference in competitions for public contracts to historically disadvantaged groups, such as racial minorities. That’s a sign her agency may use its authority to pursue legal cases against districts it believes allow for racial preferences that the Trump administration contends are illegal.”
Finally, Dhillon’s division took an historic step away from civil rights enforcement in the nation’s public schools by terminating a mass of civil rights consent decrees. The NY Times‘ Bender reported: “The Justice Department… ended its watchdog role in more than 50 cases enforcing racial desegregation in schools, mostly in the Deep South, a significant milestone in the Trump administration’s bid to overhaul civil rights enforcement in America. Justice Department records showed that 57 desegregation orders have been dismissed since the start of President Trump’s second term, although it could not be verified late Thursday that a judge had ruled in each one. Nearly 80 percent of the cases were in five Southern states—Alabama with five, Georgia with 15, Louisiana with 11, Mississippi with 13, and South Carolina with one… The Justice Department suggested that the desegregation cases were relics of the nation’s past that continued to impose unnecessary financial burdens on local governments. ‘In some cases, school districts have been under federal control for more than 60 years,’ Ms. Dhillon said in a statement. Dhillon continued: ‘In this administration, we are ending prolonged federal oversight of these school districts because the effort does not reflect the reality of those classrooms today.’ ”
Bender describes the response of groups who work for the protection of civil rights: “Groups including the N.A.A.C.P. have said that desegregation orders do more than change the racial makeup of classrooms by mandating equal funding, access to high-quality facilities and fair representation in advanced placement programs.”
Harmeet Dhillon’s Impact on Education in America
More than anyone in Donald Trump’s second administration, Harmeet Dhillon has represented the threat to a decades-long effort to repair the educational injustices of slavery and Jim Crow.
In his newest book, Dangerous Learning, constitutional law professor Derek W. Black summarizes what civil rights advocates have worked to achieve during the lifetimes of most of us who are reading this post today: “Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny fundamentally altered the way society thinks about education, not just of Black children but of all children. Laws prohibiting discrimination against students based on sex, language status, ethnicity, alienage, disability, poverty, and homelessness all grew out of the foundation Brown laid. For the past half century, the federal legal apparatus as well as several state regimes have aimed to deliver equal educational opportunity.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 275)
Harmeet Dhillon has most prominently represented the Trump administration’s attack on that legacy. Dhillon has now left the administration, but there are others who will continue twisting the meaning of our nation’s civil rights struggle and attempting to undo the progress we have made. Protecting all children’s rights in the nation’s public schools, and protecting K-12 public schools and the nation’s colleges and universities from the imposition of a narrow and distorted ideology will continue to require public vigilance and advocacy.