The woman who dropped the federal police reform agreements reached after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor is leaving the Justice Department. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, resigned Thursday after about 19 months running the division, and the people she leaves behind are the ones who needed it most.
Black Americans are the people that division was built for. It was created to enforce the Voting Rights Act, to desegregate schools and to police the police. Under Dhillon it dismissed the consent decrees with the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments, closed Biden-era findings of constitutional violations against six more departments, and dropped dozens of school desegregation cases, according to civil rights groups. The agencies whose investigations were closed include police in Phoenix, Memphis and Oklahoma City, and the Louisiana State Police.
The division was left hollowed out. More than 75% of its workforce at the start of Trump’s second term is gone, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Dhillon herself has called it the “biggest single personnel self-purge in DOJ history.” Roughly 300 attorneys departed, and she recruited more than 130 lawyers to replace them, many with backgrounds in conservative advocacy.
What the division did instead is plain from her own farewell. “We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women and girls’ sports, and so much more,” she wrote. Her office investigated university diversity programs, pursued religious liberty and gun rights cases, and pressed states for detailed voter records even after losing in court.
Dhillon says it was her call. “I wasn’t asked to resign. I resigned three weeks ago, and Susie asked me to please wait until after the midterms,” she told Fox News Digital, referring to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department is “grateful for her dedicated public service.”
Civil rights groups did not see service. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said she operated as “a partisan operative dismantling and perverting” her agency. Stacey Young, a former division attorney, called her “the most destructive, lawless and hateful” head in the department’s history.
Her defenders will say the division was right to look at discrimination against white applicants, religious believers and women athletes, and that the departments she let go were not under court order forever. Those are arguments for a different division. This one exists because local police, school boards and election officials spent a century failing Black people, and a federal government that stops checking leaves them free to do it again.
No successor has been named. The Democrats who won the House last week will hold the first oversight hearings, and the question for them is not who replaces Dhillon but whether the decrees in Minneapolis and Louisville, and the investigations in Memphis and Phoenix, are reopened.
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