Trump Taps HUD's Civil Rights Enforcer to Carry On Harmeet Dhillon's Work at the Justice Department

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has a new leader, and the administration's message is that the mission will not change.

Attorney General Todd Blanche announced on November 10 that Craig Trainor has been appointed to lead the division on a temporary basis, The Epoch Times reported. Trainor replaces Harmeet Dhillon, who announced her resignation on November 5 after about a year and a half on the job.

Trainor comes from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he served as assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity and oversaw enforcement of HUD's civil rights laws nationwide, according to Blanche's announcement as reported by The Epoch Times. Blanche called him the "principal architect of HUD's civil rights enforcement policies," crediting those policies with cutting a Biden-era backlog of fair housing cases in half.

Trainor is also a former aide to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Washington Examiner reported. His appointment fills one of several vacancies that have opened at the Justice Department since Democrats won control of Congress, according to the Examiner. It is not yet clear whether Trainor will be nominated for the job permanently, and the Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment, The Epoch Times reported. Blanche also said Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate has resigned, according to The Epoch Times.

Dhillon, a California lawyer whom the Senate confirmed in April 2025, announced her departure in a social media post, the AP and The Epoch Times reported. In that post, she called the job the honor of a lifetime and credited her team with ending illegal diversity, equity and inclusion practices and protecting women's and girls' sports, according to the AP.

She told the AP the decision was hers. She said she made it weeks ago, that the White House asked her to stay through the midterm elections, that she was not asked to resign and that she plans to return to private practice. "My decision, my choice," she said. NPR reported that she told President Trump in early October that she planned to return to private practice after the midterms, according to an email to staff that NPR obtained.

Blanche praised her leadership and thanked her for her service, according to the AP, NPR and The Epoch Times. Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist called Dhillon the civil rights star of the Trump administration.

Dhillon came to the job as a well-known conservative lawyer. She challenged California's pandemic stay-at-home order, ran for chair of the Republican National Committee in 2023, and her law firm represented Trump in a matter before the House January 6 committee, the AP reported. She was born in India to a Sikh family.

By any measure, the division looked different when she left than when she arrived.

Under Dhillon, the division opened investigations into universities over diversity programs, alleged discrimination against white and Asian applicants, and failures to address antisemitism on campus, according to the AP and NPR. NPR reported that the division sued UCLA and Harvard over antisemitism. The AP reported that her pressure campaign led to settlements with universities and to the resignation of the University of Virginia's president.

The division also enforced the president's executive orders on what NPR described as indoctrination in schools, gender ideology and bias against Christians, and it pursued protections for women and girls in sports, the AP reported. In September, the department ended dozens of decades-old school desegregation cases, which Dhillon described as outdated consent decrees, The Epoch Times reported.

The division moved away from the police-reform settlements and investigations that defined the previous administration's approach, the AP and NPR reported. It also pressed states for detailed voter registration records. NPR reported that the division sued dozens of states for voter information and that courts threw out those suits, and the AP noted repeated court losses. The Examiner reported that Dhillon steered the division toward obtaining state voter rolls and challenging diversity policies, priorities that now fall to Trainor.

Critics see the same record very differently. The AP reported that more than three-quarters of the division's workforce at the start of Trump's second term has left, a turnover Dhillon herself has described as the largest self-purge in the department's history. NPR put the number of career attorneys who left at roughly 300 and described their replacements as less experienced. Stacey Young, a former division attorney who now leads an alumni group of former Justice Department employees, called Dhillon the most destructive leader in the division's history, according to NPR and the AP.

The coverage itself is part of the story. The AP's headline described her tenure as a radical overhaul, and its report portrayed Dhillon as a powerful and divisive figure. NPR described her 18 months in charge as tumultuous and said she used the division's enforcement powers to advance the president's political agenda. Those are characterizations, and readers should weigh them against what the division actually did and what its leaders say about it.

The civil rights laws promise equal treatment to every American, regardless of race, religion or sex. For years, that promise was bent to justify preferences by race in admissions and hiring. Dhillon's division took the view that the law means what it says: discrimination against white or Asian applicants is still discrimination, Jewish students deserve the same protection from harassment as anyone else, people of faith deserve equal treatment, and girls deserve a fair shot on the field. Those are not radical ideas. They are the plain text of the law, and they echo the Fourteenth Amendment's promise that every person is owed the equal protection of the laws. A division that treats Americans as individuals rather than as members of favored or disfavored groups is doing exactly what the civil rights movement asked the country to do.

The staff departures deserve honest context. When a new administration changes priorities, career lawyers who disagree with the new direction sometimes choose to leave, and Dhillon has described the exodus as voluntary. The real test for Trainor will be whether the division wins in court. The voter-roll lawsuits are a reminder that worthy goals need strong legal footing: accurate voter rolls are a legitimate public interest, but judges have not been persuaded by the division's approach so far.

Trainor's record at HUD, as Blanche describes it, is about clearing cases and enforcing the law efficiently. That practical competence will matter with a hostile Congress watching every move.

Trainor serves in an acting capacity, and no permanent nominee has been named. If a permanent nominee is named after January, that pick will face a Senate controlled by Democrats, who won both chambers of Congress in last week's elections. Dhillon is returning to private practice. For the division, the work continues: the push for state voter rolls and the challenges to diversity policies now fall to Trainor, the Examiner reported, along with the rest of a docket that Dhillon's supporters say restored equal treatment under the law.