President Donald Trump has appointed Craig Trainor, a housing official who wrote the administration's 2025 letter to schools on diversity programs, as acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Attorney General Todd Blanche announced on X on Tuesday evening, November 10. Trainor is the division's third leader in a week, following the resignation of Harmeet Dhillon, whose departure Awaaz Punjab reported on November 5.
Source: Attorney General Todd Blanche announcement on X, via Zark News
The Civil Rights Division, created in 1957, enforces federal laws against discrimination in voting, housing, jobs, policing and schools, and it also houses the department's dedicated Second Amendment Section, which sues over gun-permit delays and state gun laws. Who leads it decides how hard the federal government pushes on ballot access, fair housing, workplace bias and gun rights across the country.
Source: PoliAlert
"I am pleased to announce that President Trump has appointed Craig Trainor as Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division," Blanche wrote. "Since October 2025, Craig has served as the Senate-confirmed Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, where he oversaw nationwide enforcement of HUD civil rights statutes." Blanche credited Trainor as "the principal architect of HUD's civil rights enforcement policies, which cut the Biden-era fair housing case backlog in half" - a figure the administration has given and which has not been independently verified.
Source: Daily Caller News Foundation via The Daily BS
Third leader in a week
Dhillon, a longtime Trump ally confirmed in April 2025, resigned effective November 5, one day after the midterm elections; she told Fox News she had decided weeks earlier to return to private practice and had agreed to stay until after the election. Her principal deputy, Jesus A. Osete, then ran the division for about five days - he is also a pending nominee for a federal judgeship in Missouri - until Blanche announced Trainor's appointment on Tuesday. As of Wednesday afternoon, the division's own homepage still listed Osete as acting head.
Source: Zark News
Trainor's appointment is the next step in a story this site has followed since Dhillon stepped down last week. Read the earlier report: Dhillon resigns as DOJ civil rights chief
The letter that made his name
Trainor is best known for an earlier job. As the Education Department's acting assistant secretary for civil rights, he signed a letter on February 14, 2025, telling schools that diversity, equity and inclusion programs and other race-based treatment of students break federal civil rights law, and that schools could lose federal money. He also urged colleges to end affinity housing. The NAACP sued over the letter, and in August 2025 a federal judge threw the guidance out nationwide, ruling the department had changed schools' legal duties without following the required process. The Justice Department has since put similar policies on the books through other routes, and under a June interagency agreement the department is also set to take on more civil rights enforcement work from the Education Department.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Before the Education Department, Trainor was senior special counsel to Representative Jim Jordan on the House Judiciary Committee, where he led an inquiry into claims of censorship and antisemitic harassment on campuses. He later worked as a senior litigation lawyer at the America First Policy Institute under Pam Bondi, after more than a decade as a prosecutor and as a criminal defence and civil rights lawyer in New York City, and he clerked for District Judge Frederick J. Scullin Jr., who twice struck down gun-carry restrictions. The Senate confirmed him for the HUD fair-housing post on October 7, 2025, by 51 votes to 47, on party lines.
Source: Zark News
What he inherits
Trainor takes over a division Dhillon pointed in new directions. Its biggest campaign was a series of lawsuits demanding that states hand over their full voter rolls, including Social Security numbers, so the department could check them against a citizenship database. According to court reporting cited by Zark News, the department lost every case a judge decided - 28 in a row - with the latest ruling coming on Tuesday in Delaware, where a federal judge dismissed its suit. The division is also pursuing lawsuits accusing UCLA and Harvard of allowing antisemitism on campus, with a staff thinned by the departure of hundreds of attorneys.
Source: Zark News, citing Democracy Docket court reporting
He also inherits the Second Amendment Section Dhillon created - the division's first. It filed the department's first affirmative lawsuit on behalf of gun owners on September 30, 2025, against the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department over concealed-carry permit delays, a case that ended in a settlement in August. How an acting chief balances the gun-rights docket against voting, housing and schools cases will be an early test of his tenure.
Source: FFL Search, reporting on the Second Amendment Section
Brian Nieves, a former chief of staff to Blanche who worked with Trainor on the Judiciary Committee, called him "talented and dedicated" and said he will "do a fantastic job." Civil rights groups have opposed Trainor before: at his housing confirmation, Senator Elizabeth Warren said he had helped weaken civil rights enforcement, the National Fair Housing Alliance called his record troubling, and NAACP President Derrick Johnson called the schools letter a "gross distortion of reality." Trainor has not commented publicly on the new role.
What happens next
Trainor serves on an acting basis. A permanent assistant attorney general must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and the administration has not said whether Trainor will be nominated. From January, the new Congress will be led by Democrats, who won control in the midterms, which would make confirmation of a nominee with Trainor's record difficult. For now he can direct the division's cases, settlements and investigations without a confirmation vote.
Source: Zark News
For Punjabi and other immigrant families across the United States, the division is not an abstraction: its lawyers decide whether to challenge state voter-roll practices, how aggressively to pursue housing and job discrimination complaints, and how schools may treat students. Those files now sit on a new desk, under a leader whose best-known act was a letter a federal court later threw out - and the cases themselves continue while Washington argues over who should hold the job permanently.