President Donald Trump has named Craig Trainor, a housing official who wrote the administration's 2025 letter to schools on diversity programs, to temporarily run the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. The division enforces federal laws against discrimination in voting, housing, jobs, policing and schools.
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the appointment on X on Tuesday evening. "I am pleased to announce that President Trump has appointed Craig Trainor as Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division," Blanche wrote. He credited Trainor as "the principal architect of HUD's civil rights enforcement policies, which cut the Biden-era fair housing case backlog in half."
Three leaders in one week
Trainor is taking the job on an acting basis. The permanent post requires Senate confirmation, and the administration has not said whether Trainor will be nominated for it.
He is the division's third leader in a week. Harmeet Dhillon, a longtime Trump ally confirmed in April 2025, resigned effective November 5, one day after the midterm elections. Dhillon told Fox News she had decided weeks earlier to return to private practice and agreed to stay until after the election. Her principal deputy, Jesus Osete, then ran the division for five days; he is also a pending nominee for a federal judgeship in Missouri.
The letter that made his name
Trainor comes from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he has been the assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity since October 2025. The Senate confirmed him to that job 51 to 47.
He is best known for an earlier post. As the Education Department's acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Trainor signed a letter on February 14, 2025, saying 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. The NAACP sued him over the letter. In August 2025, a federal judge threw the letter out nationwide, ruling that the department had changed schools' legal duties without following the required process.
Before joining the administration, 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 college campuses. He 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 defense and civil rights lawyer in New York City.
What he inherits
Trainor inherits a division that Dhillon pointed in new directions. Its biggest campaign was lawsuits demanding that states hand over their voter rolls, including Social Security numbers, so the department could check them against a citizenship database. The department lost every case a judge decided, 28 in a row. The last ruling came Tuesday in Delaware, where a federal judge dismissed the department's suit.
Dhillon also created the division's first Second Amendment Section, which sues over gun permit delays and state gun laws. Its first major case, against the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department over slow concealed carry permits, ended in a settlement in August. Trainor oversees all of it, along with lawsuits accusing UCLA and Harvard of allowing antisemitism on campus, and a staff thinned by the departure of hundreds of attorneys.
Praise from allies, warnings from critics
Republicans who know Trainor praised the choice. 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, and the National Fair Housing Alliance called his record troubling. NAACP President Derrick Johnson called the school letter a "gross distortion of reality." Trainor has not commented on the new role.
What happens next turns on the Senate. A confirmed chief needs Senate approval, and starting in January the new Congress will be led by Democrats, who won control in the midterms and are unlikely to make confirmation easy for a nominee with Trainor's record.
The division decides how hard the federal government pushes on voting access, housing discrimination, job bias and gun rights. What do you think its top priority should be under its new leader? Tell us in the comments.
Reporting note: This story is based on Attorney General Todd Blanche's announcement on X on November 10, 2026, reporting by Bloomberg Law, Politico, the Washington Examiner and USA Today, the text of Trainor's February 14, 2025, Education Department letter, court reporting by Democracy Docket on the voter roll lawsuits and the Delaware ruling, and biographies published by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Republican National Lawyers Association and Catholic University's law school. Blanche's claim that Trainor cut the fair housing case backlog in half is the administration's figure and has not been independently verified.
