DOJ’s Harmeet Dhillon Sent 1,000 Monitors to the Polls Tuesday. Two Days Later, She’s Resigning

Harmeet Dhillon is leaving the Justice Department. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who runs DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, resigned Thursday, sources told Fox News. Bloomberg Law broke the news first that morning, reporting she was expected to step down “as soon as today” and that she’s the first of what could be several senior DOJ officials to leave after this week’s midterms.

Neither Dhillon nor the department had said anything on the record by late Thursday morning. Her last post on her official account went up on Election Day.

That’s the timeline in one line. Tuesday, she put the largest team of election monitors in DOJ history into every state. Wednesday, Democrats had the House and the Senate. Thursday, she’s out.

What she built

Dhillon was sworn in in April 2025, and she pointed a division best known for suing police departments and fighting over district maps at a new list: voter rolls, noncitizen voting, illegal DEI, campus antisemitism and attacks on houses of worship.

The monitors. Biden’s DOJ watched 64 jurisdictions in 24 states in the 2022 midterms, according to NPR. Dhillon sent about 1,000 observers to all 50 states this year. Democrats sued to stop them. On Nov. 2, a federal judge in Washington turned down the NAACP’s bid to keep them away from the polls, and the monitors went in.

Noncitizen voting. For years the line was that noncitizen voting is too rare to prosecute. Dhillon’s answer to that, on 60 Minutes in October, was that nobody had looked. “The distrust is there,” she told Lesley Stahl. “And so, all of these kinds of crimes are being prosecuted now for the first time really, in volume. And look, even the Biden administration prosecuted 13 people for noncitizen voting.” On Nov. 2, the day before the election, the department announced charges against 63 people for election crimes in one sweep, after 48 the week before and 28 in California the week before that.

The voter rolls. On July 7 her division sent letters to all 50 states and D.C. about noncitizens on their voter rolls, warning that knowingly keeping them there can be a federal crime. Democratic officials, unions and the NAACP fought back in court.

The staff. Dhillon has been open that most of the old division walked out. “When I started, it had about 400 attorneys,” she told Hugh Hewitt’s show in September. After the team said it would carry out the president’s orders on DEI and voter rolls, “eventually about 300 of those attorneys quit,” she said, and she “recruited over a hundred” replacements.

Holder already told you what comes next

Those replacements are exactly who Democrats are after. Ten days before the election, Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general and now the chairman of the Democrats’ national redistricting group, went on MS NOW and said it plainly.

“All those people who Harmeet Dhillon has hired, for instance, in the Civil Rights Division and turned around what the historic mission of that division has been, they got to go,” Holder said. “So whatever president comes in next, they have to get rid of all of those Harmeet Dhillons that have been appointed into those positions.” Dhillon answered on 𝕏 with one word: “Wow.”

Holder was talking about a Democratic president in 2029. Democrats don’t have that. What they won Tuesday is subpoena power. When the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3, Democrats will run the House and Senate Judiciary committees, which oversee DOJ, and they can call the division’s lawyers in to testify about the monitors, the voter-roll demands and the noncitizen cases. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, posted “LAWYER UP” on election night.

What happens to her cases

The resignation doesn’t erase anything already filed. The noncitizen voting indictments are in federal court, and the U.S. attorneys who brought them still have them. The monitors’ Election Day notes went back to Washington, and DOJ said before the election that it would review them and “act where appropriate.” Who reads them now is the open question.

The department hasn’t said who will run the division after Dhillon. Before DOJ, she ran her own San Francisco firm, the Dhillon Law Group. Bloomberg has reported she plans to go back to it.

What to watch: an official announcement from Dhillon or DOJ, who takes over the Civil Rights Division, whether other senior DOJ officials follow her out, and the first subpoenas when Democrats take the gavels on Jan. 3.