Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division, resigns

By Hannah Rabinowitz, Evan Perez, CNN

(CNN) — Harmeet Dhillon has resigned from her post as the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, making her the first senior official to leave the administration since the midterms.

Attorney General Todd Blanche announced her resignation in a social media post, saying that she has “led the Civil Rights Division with conviction.”

“She has defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor,” Blanche wrote on X “The Department is grateful for her dedicated public service, and we wish her every success in her future endeavors.”

In her year and a half as Assistant Attorney General, Dhillon upended the division in an attempt to reshape its work to fit into the Trump era — shifting from its traditional work enforcing laws encouraging elections access and police reform to fighting what she has called “woke ideology.”

In recent weeks, Dhillon, a former legal adviser to President Donald Trump’s campaign, appeared increasingly sidelined as the department pursued a series of high-profile election-related legal cases of high interest to the president.

“Where’s Harmeet?” asked one GOP official working on some of the legal cases the department pursued to try to support Trump’s claims of Democrats trying to steal the election.

Dhillon took on a high profile albeit non-traditional presence on social media, announcing initiatives alongside her love of knitting, while embracing right-wing causes, including opening a section dedicated to the Second Amendment and promoting gun ownership.

She leaves behind a division faltering due to a lack of staffing — more than 75% of the Civil Rights Division was fired or quit during her term. She recruited several conservative lawyers to join the division in their place, but those hires have far from made up for the ouster of decades of knowledge on civil rights laws.

In fact, the gutting of the Civil Rights Division was part of the problem for Dhillon because some conservatives complained that inexperienced lawyers in her section weren’t able to handle cases referred to her division.

Dhillon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Dhillon’s departure was all but guaranteed to come in the days following the election. Her control over the Civil Rights Division had been declining for months, officials familiar with the matter said, in part because of her repeated losses in court and the perception among colleagues that she was good at announcing initiatives and less effective at accomplishing them.

The largest losses Dhillon suffered in court were over her attempts to gain access to voter rolls. Judges across the country tossed lawsuits that Dhillon claimed would help states “clean” their rolls of non-citizens, sharply criticizing what they saw as an effort to use the law to disenfranchise voters or access their personal data.

Dhillon was increasingly sidelined from the department’s voting efforts as the midterms approached, sources told CNN. As the election approached, it was Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter who signed on to the highest profile lawsuits, not Dhillon.

Stanley Woodward, Associate Attorney General, with whom Dhillon had a strained relationship, took the lead appearing in court defending the administration’s legal moves.

Still, other efforts she spearheaded came with mixed success. She sent letters to and filed lawsuits against universities she accused of brad antisemitism and discrimination largely against white students, for example, gut those efforts rarely resulted in a court win — or even in a lawsuit at all.

Some of the universities committed to help root out antisemitism, but sources have told CNN there was little framework or follow up from the department at all.

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