Trump Names Craig Trainor Acting Head of Justice Department Civil Rights Division

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump has named Craig Trainor, a housing official, to temporarily run the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, the office that enforces federal civil rights laws on voting, housing, jobs, policing and schools.

Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the appointment in a post 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." That backlog figure is the administration's own and has not been independently verified.

Third leader in a week

Trainor is the division's third leader in a week. Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally confirmed by the Senate 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. Her principal deputy, Jesus Osete, then ran the division for five days.

The appointment is an acting one. The permanent job requires Senate confirmation, and the administration has not said whether Trainor will be nominated for it.

The letter that made his name

Trainor has been the Housing and Urban Development Department's assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity since October 2025. The Senate confirmed him to that post 51 to 47.

He is best known for an earlier job. As the Education Department's acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Trainor 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. The NAACP sued over the letter. In August 2025 a federal judge threw the letter out nationwide, ruling that the department had changed schools' legal duties without the required process.

Before joining the administration, Trainor was a senior special counsel to Representative Jim Jordan on the House Judiciary Committee, where he led an inquiry into campus censorship and antisemitism claims. Jordan was elected House minority leader on Tuesday. He previously worked at the America First Policy Institute and as a prosecutor and defense lawyer in New York City.

What he inherits

Trainor inherits a division reshaped under Dhillon. Its largest campaign was a series of lawsuits demanding that states hand over their voter rolls, including Social Security numbers. The department has lost every one of those cases that a judge has decided, 28 in a row, according to court reporting by Democracy Docket. The most recent ruling came on 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 sued UCLA and Harvard University over alleged campus antisemitism. Trainor now oversees all of it, with a staff thinned by hundreds of attorney departures under Dhillon.

Reaction

Brian Nieves, a former chief of staff to Blanche, called him "talented and dedicated" and said he will "do a fantastic job." 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 2025 school letter a "gross distortion of reality." Trainor has not commented on the new role.