President Donald Trump has appointed an acting chief of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, replacing Harmeet Dhillon, who submitted her resignation last week.
Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a Nov. 10 post on X that Craig Trainor was appointed to the temporary position.
Blanche said Trainor has served as the assistant secretary of the Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity under Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and “oversaw nationwide enforcement of HUD civil rights statutes.”
Trainor “was also the principal architect of HUD’s civil rights enforcement policies, which cut the Biden-era fair housing case backlog in half,” he added. “I thank Craig for taking on this critical role and for his dedicated service to the American people and President Trump.”
It’s unclear if Trainor will be nominated to the position on a permanent basis. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Senate confirmed Dhillon to the position in April 2025, where she oversaw sweeping changes to the Civil Rights Division as she sought to reorient it to focus on protecting gun owners’ rights and ending diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in universities.
In September, she announced the DOJ would be ending dozens of decades-old desegregation cases across the United States and added that those cases were “onerous and outdated consent decrees” that were still being funded.
Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate of the Civil Rights Division also submitted his resignation, according to Blanche, who said that he was involved in cases targeting corporate DEI practices and shuttering clinics that provided “gender-affirming care” to children.
“Under his leadership, the Division pursued important affirmative litigation to challenge sanctuary policies and delivered key wins in lawsuits against local policies that endangered federal law enforcement,” the attorney general said in a Nov. 9 post on X.
Aside from Dhillon and Shumate, several other DOJ officials have also resigned after the Nov. 3 midterms, when Democrats won control of Congress.
Blanche wrote on Nov. 6 that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason Reding Quiñones and John Eisenberg, a top national security official in the DOJ, both submitted their resignations.
“We are grateful for Jason’s leadership in combatting violent crime, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and transnational crime, including the indictment of Raúl Castro,” he said.
Blanche said Eisenberg had helped bolster the United States’ “ability to address threats, both foreign and domestic.”
Top aide and litigator Henry Whitaker wrote last week in a court filing that he is “imminently leaving the government for another opportunity,” and provided no other details except that R. Trent McCotter will represent the U.S. government in his cases in the future.
Trump announced on Nov. 6 that Stephen Miller will become his chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles, who will be moved to another position.
Wiles wrote in a Nov. 6 post on X that it was her last day as White House chief of staff and that “serving President Trump in the White House has been the honor of a lifetime.”
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