Harmeet Dhillon, the chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, resigned on Thursday after conflicts with department leaders, including disagreements over legal strategy in the midterm elections, two people familiar with the situation said.
Ms. Dhillon, whose tenure was defined by a successful pressure campaign against universities and unsuccessful efforts to obtain voting data from states, had been telling friends for weeks that she planned to step down to return to her law firm, the people said.
In less than two years on the job, Ms. Dhillon repurposed a unit created to address Jim Crow injustices into a battering ram against the left, setting aside its longtime mission of fighting discrimination against Black people to battle campus antisemitism and diversity initiatives.
The announcement came two days after voters handed Republicans a staggering electoral defeat. It is not likely to be the last resignation, as officials in the depleted department face the prospect of intense scrutiny from an antagonistic Democratic-run Congress.
President Trump and other White House officials recently expressed annoyance over a recent appearance Ms. Dhillon made on “60 Minutes,” according to people with knowledge of the situation. In the interview, she downplayed the prevalence of voting by undocumented immigrants — a central driver of the department’s aggressive legal strategy in the weeks leading up to the election.
Ms. Dhillon, whose law firm was part of Mr. Trump’s campaign legal team, told Fox News she had resigned of her volition and withheld her announcement at the request of Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, until after Election Day.
“I resigned three weeks ago, and Susie asked me to please wait until after the midterms,” she said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Attorney General Todd Blanche praised her work, saying in a social media post on Thursday that she had led the division “with conviction.”
“She has defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor,” he wrote. “The Department is grateful for her dedicated public service, and we wish her every success in her future endeavors.”
Ms. Dhillon’s hard-line approach, laid out in a series of April 2025 memos declaring her intention to pursue a conservative culture war agenda, prompted the departure of hundreds of career officials in the unit. That left her short-handed to pursue many of her objectives, including the deployment of 1,000 election monitors around the country on Election Day.
“From Day 1, Harmeet Dhillon abdicated her responsibility to enforce our nation’s federal civil rights laws and destroyed the crown jewel of the Justice Department,” said Kristen Clarke, who served in Ms. Dhillon’s role in the Biden administration and is now the general counsel of the NAACP. “We know the fight for civil rights long preceded her and will live on long after her.”
Ms. Dhillon’s resignation was not unexpected. The department’s leadership was frustrated by what they saw as her go-it-alone approach, which included an unwillingness to attend planning meetings with Mr. Blanche’s staff, according to an official who requested anonymity to discuss internal conversations.
Administration officials also expressed concerns that Ms. Dhillon’s highest-profile effort on elections, a monthslong legal campaign to force states to hand over sensitive voter roll data, failed time after time, the person said.
Her team also helped the department develop the two most significant cases filed before the election. One is an effort to impound 20,000 ballots in California to bolster the administration’s unsubstantiated claim of illegal voting by unauthorized immigrants. The other was a lawsuit seeking to preemptively block certification of the Senate race in Alaska, after Democrats recruited a candidate with the same name as the incumbent Republican senator, Dan Sullivan, to appear on Tuesday’s ballot.
But neither Ms. Dhillon nor members of her senior staff signed either lawsuit, or represented the department in court. Two top Blanche deputies, Trent McCotter and Stanley E. Woodward Jr., filled in.
It is an ill-kept secret that Ms. Dhillon disdained Mr. Woodward, the associate attorney general, and that she was interested in replacing him as the department’s No. 3 official.
In April, when Mr. Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general, Ms. Dhillon made it clear that she believed Mr. Woodward, whom she cast as an overbearing bumbler, needed to go, according to six people familiar with the situation.
Mr. Trump initially appeared to be on board. Time passed.
Mr. Woodward stayed put. Ms. Dhillon is leaving.
Michael C. Bender contributed reporting.
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