# Harmeet Dhillon Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division since 2025. A prominent Republican election lawyer and former RNC official, she redirected the division — historically the federal government's racial-justice enforcement arm — toward anti-DEI, anti-transgender, and 'anti-Christian bias' priorities, prompting an exodus of career attorneys. ## July 2026: 50-state voter-citizenship letters On **July 7, 2026**, Dhillon sent letters under DOJ letterhead to **election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia**, demanding that they verify the citizenship of registered voters. The letters warned of **criminal prosecution** for officials who fail to ensure only citizens are on the rolls and imposed a **five-day deadline** for response — a timeline election administrators across party lines called unworkable during an active election cycle. Among the chief election officers who publicly refused was Utah Lieutenant Governor [[Deidre Henderson]], a Republican, who called the DOJ's letter a "love letter" laced with prosecution threats and noted courts had already ruled the underlying data demands illegal — a rare on-the-record rebuke from within the president's own party. The letters represent a new use of the Civil Rights Division: instead of protecting citizens' right to vote (the division's historical mission), Dhillon deployed it as an enforcement arm for the [[Voter Suppression]] strategy the [[SAVE Act]] would codify legislatively. The DOJ pressure campaign ran in parallel with [[Donald Trump]]'s decision to withhold his signature from the [[21st Century ROAD to Housing Act]] as leverage for the SAVE Act, and with the July 9 purge of the [[Election Assistance Commission]] — three simultaneous vectors aimed at election-machinery capture ahead of the 2026 midterms.