How Harmeet Dhillon Reshaped the DOJ Civil Rights Division
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, has redirected the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division since taking over as chief in April after President Trump returned to office in 2025.
The shift was detailed in reporting published Oct. 11, 2026. It concerns a division created almost 70 years ago during the movement to end racial segregation. The division historically worked to combat discrimination and protect constitutional rights in voting, housing, employment, education and policing NPR.
Since 2025, the division dropped investigations and withdrew statements of interest — short briefs in which the department weighs in on someone else's lawsuit — in dozens of cases involving voting rights, racial discrimination and civil actions against anti-abortion activists.
The division also ended investigations into police departments over alleged constitutional violations. Those pattern-or-practice inquiries look at a whole department's routine practices, not a single incident, and had been a main tool for federal oversight of local law enforcement. Career staff who handled them left or were reassigned.
On elections, the division sent monitors to states' primary elections and filed lawsuits demanding voter information from multiple states. The suits were tied to a focus on alleged election fraud by noncitizens. Judges have tossed more than two dozen of the voter-information lawsuits, most recently in Georgia.
In the two months before Oct. 11, 2026, the division accused law schools at UC Berkeley and Duke University and medical schools at UC San Francisco and George Washington University of discriminating against white and Asian students in admissions. The notices placed admissions offices under federal civil rights review after court limits on affirmative action.
At a Federalist Society event last November, Dhillon said prior civil rights enforcement thinking reflected "benevolent racism" designed to punish descendants of those responsible for past sins.
Dhillon pushed out hundreds of longtime Civil Rights Division attorneys and issued new mission statements for the division's 11 sections NPR. In April 2025, the department reassigned about a dozen division attorneys amid a shakeup Reuters. By May 2025, about 70% of the division's lawyers were leaving. By Dec. 9, 2025, about 75% had left, according to reporting on personnel data, and former employees said there was a coordinated effort to drive attorneys out Reuters.
The office of Sen. Peter Welch obtained new policy statements Dhillon issued to nine sections of the division. In April 2025, Dhillon had redirected staff to focus on combating antisemitism and anti-Christian bias. As of Jan. 29, 2026, the department's Tax Division had closed and its Federal Programs Branch had seen significant departures, part of a broader workforce shift among federal litigators.
The broader context here is capacity and forum. A division that once filed statements of interest to shape voting, housing and employment law now files fewer such briefs. A division that once investigated police departments now defends voter-list demands in federal court, often unsuccessfully. For civil rights litigators, advocacy groups and state election officials, that changes where precedent gets made and who still has the experience to make it.
