Harmeet Dhillon stepped down from her role leading the Justice Department’s civil rights unit, marking the first senior DOJ official to resign following Democrats’ massive midterm wins.
Dhillon, who has vastly transformed the Civil Rights Division since her Senate confirmation in April 2025, had told allies that she would be leaving the department after the midterm elections, according to four people familiar.
Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed in a post on X that he accepted Dhillon’s resignation. He credited her with leading the division “with conviction the past 18 months.”
“She has defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor,” Blanche said. “The Department is grateful for her dedicated public service, and we wish her every success in her future endeavors.”
The staunch Trump ally leaves behind a Civil Rights Division that’s shifted toward conservative causes, including religious liberties and the formation of a Second Amendment section. Following the mass exodus of career attorneys from the division, she’s recruited dozens of new attorneys with backgrounds steeped in conservative advocacy to work on litigation over state voter rolls, immigration, and alleged antisemitism on college campuses.
Former officials said the department is bracing for multiple other top political appointees to exit in the lame duck period before the New Year. Dhillon would be the second Senate-confirmed DOJ official to depart in recent weeks, following Patrick Davis’ resignation from the Office of Legislative Affairs last month.
Dhillon, a former Republican Party official and campaign lawyer for President Donald Trump, previously indicated in an August roundtable interview with Bloomberg reporters and editors that she planned to return to her California-based law firm, Dhillon Law Group, following her tenure at DOJ.
The firm, which has been managed by her brother Mandeep Singh Dhillon in her absence, is now much smaller than it once was, Dhillon said at the time.
“In terms of private practice, when the president is done with me, I loved being a lawyer in private practice,” Dhillon said, adding that she planned to take what she learned from her time at DOJ and “continue to help plaintiffs.”
Whitaker Exits
The department also announced another significant personnel departure in a court filing Thursday. Henry Whitaker, a veteran litigator who’d been a key aide in the attorney general’s office, “is imminently leaving the government for another opportunity.”
Whitaker, as a counsel to both Blanche and his predecessor Pam Bondi, was the top attorney defending the Trump administration in multiple legal challenges over its authority to retain acting US attorneys who hadn’t been approved by the Senate or district courts.
He was also on a short list of officials who returned from the first Trump administration’s DOJ, when he served as a senior official in the Office of Legal Counsel.