Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department official who ended the federal police reform agreements born of George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s killings, is leaving the job. She is the first senior member of the Trump administration to go since Tuesday’s midterms.
Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, told Fox News Digital the timing was not a firing. “I wasn’t asked to resign. I resigned three weeks ago, and Susie asked me to please wait until after the midterms,” she said, referring to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the departure on social media, saying she “led the Civil Rights Division with conviction.” Reports on the resignation do not say who will replace her.
For Black Americans, the division she ran is the office that investigates police departments, enforces the Voting Rights Act and sues over housing and lending discrimination. In 19 months, Dhillon pointed it somewhere else.
In May 2025, the department moved to dismiss the proposed consent decrees with the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments, deals negotiated after Mr. Floyd’s murder and the police killing of Ms. Taylor. Its filing said the department “no longer believes that the proposed consent decree would be in the public interest.” The division also closed Biden-era investigations of six other police departments. It withdrew election suits in Georgia, Virginia and Alabama, including the challenge to a 2021 Georgia voting law that civil rights groups said made voting harder for Black residents.
The division’s priorities moved to challenging DEI programs, religious discrimination, transgender athletes, gun rights and what it calls election integrity. It has sued dozens of states for their voter rolls, a fight that reached California’s ballots in this election.
The people who did the work paid for it. About 300 attorneys left the division during her tenure, according to reports on the resignation, among them senior lawyers who quit in January after the division declined to investigate an ICE agent’s shooting of Renee Good. Dhillon says she recruited more than 130 lawyers to rebuild the office.
She says she is leaving because she accomplished what she set out to do and wants to return to private practice. On the record, she is right about that. Police departments that were headed for federal supervision are not under it. A division that once sued police departments and states over discrimination now mostly acts for people who say they are the ones discriminated against.
Democrats take the House in January, with Hakeem Jeffries as speaker, and they will have a say over who runs the division next. Black voters who sent them there will be watching whether the office goes back to enforcing the law as written in 1965. The White House has not said who it will nominate.
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