Trump Taps Craig Trainor to Lead DOJ Civil Rights Division
President Donald Trump has appointed Craig Trainor, a senior housing official, as acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, filling the vacancy left by Harmeet Dhillon’s resignation last week.
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the appointment on Tuesday evening, writing on X that Mr Trump had chosen Mr Trainor to serve as Acting Assistant Attorney General for the division. The move was first reported by Politico and confirmed by Bloomberg Law.
Mr Trainor has served since October 2025 as Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a Senate-confirmed post he won by a 51-47 vote. He now takes charge of the division that enforces federal civil rights laws covering voting, housing, employment and education.
A familiar face in the administration’s civil rights battles
Mr Trainor is no stranger to the administration’s civil rights agenda. Before joining the housing department, he served as acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, where he was the official behind a 2025 letter warning schools that their federal funding was at risk over diversity programmes.
Earlier in his career, Mr Trainor worked as a prosecutor in New York, served as senior special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Jim Jordan, and was senior litigation counsel at the America First Policy Institute. He is also an Army reservist.
What Trainor inherits
Ms Dhillon took office in April 2025 after Senate confirmation and reshaped the division during roughly 19 months in charge. Under her leadership it pursued cases against universities over diversity and inclusion policies and campus antisemitism, challenged race-conscious policies, and pressed voting cases in dozens of states. She also created the division’s first Second Amendment Section, which in September brought the department’s first affirmative lawsuit on behalf of gun owners, challenging concealed-carry delays in Los Angeles County.
The overhaul came at a cost. Hundreds of career employees left the division as its priorities changed, according to reports at the time of her departure.
Between Ms Dhillon’s exit and Mr Trainor’s appointment, her principal deputy, Jesus A. Osete, ran the division. As of Wednesday afternoon, the division’s homepage still listed Mr Osete as its acting head, and Mr Trainor’s name had not yet been added.
Why Dhillon left
Ms Dhillon formally submitted her resignation on 5 November, two days after Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections. She was the first senior Trump administration official to leave since the defeats, according to several reports.
Ms Dhillon has insisted the decision was her own. She told Fox News she had decided weeks before the election to return to private practice and had informed White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in early October, staying on at the White House’s request until after the midterms.
“Serving my country as AAG for Civil Rights has been the honor of a lifetime,” she wrote on X. “We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women and girls’ sports, and so much more.”
Other reporting has offered a different account. CBS News reported that Mr Trump pushed her out after she appeared on 60 Minutes last month and offered what he considered a weak defence of the administration’s election-integrity efforts. Mr Blanche accepted the resignation and praised her service.
Her departure is part of a wider post-midterm shake-up at the department. Two other senior Justice Department officials resigned last week, and Mr Trump has also named Stephen Miller as his new chief of staff after Susie Wiles stepped aside.
What happens next
It remains unclear whether Mr Trump intends to nominate Mr Trainor to lead the division permanently, a move that would require Senate confirmation. None of the reports of his appointment said how long he would serve in the acting role.
Whoever holds the post will face a changed political landscape, with Democrats due to take control of Congress in January and already promising scrutiny of the department. The division’s docket — from voting and housing cases to the new gun-rights work — will be among the first tests of how the administration’s civil rights strategy adapts.
