Who Is Harmeet Dhillon, the Woman Upending the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division?

Constitutional and civil rights attorney Harmeet Dhillon is causing waves and Department of Justice resignations as she reorients the department’s Civil Rights Division to align with the Trump agenda.Sworn in as the assistant attorney general for civil rights just three weeks ago, Ms. Dhillon is swiftly shifting the focus of the department to fighting antisemitism on college campuses and protecting religious liberty, women’s sports and private spaces, and 2nd Amendment rights. Ms. Dhillon sent out memos to department staff outlining the division’s new priorities to enforce President Trump’s executive orders, such as “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” and “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” Critics of Ms. Dhillon say she is ignoring the division’s original mission in favor of investigating and prosecuting culture war cases at Trump’s behest. The Justice Department has paused probes into police misconduct, launched an investigation into Los Angeles County’s gun restrictions, and sued the state of Maine for violating Trump’s executive order and Title IX by allowing transgender students to compete in women’s sports. It is also investigating antisemitism on college campuses. Founded in 1957 following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Civil Rights Division’s original focus was on protecting black Americans voting rights. Since then, it has expanded to include protecting Americans from discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, and other protected classes.“She’s clearly at the behest of Trump and Bondi,” a former Civil Rights Division attorney who now works in private practice, Aaron Zisser, tells The New York Sun. “She’s going quite a ways further than certainly I’ve seen under other Republican administrations, which is to say she’s sort of flipping the mission on its head.” Ms. Dhillon says she will still focus on racial discrimination, but following Trump’s executive order on “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” she is dismissing disparate impact cases. “Where an employer or a police department or fire department actively discriminates against someone on the basis of their race, we’ll be taking action on that kind of case, not passive statistical analysis,” Ms. Dhillon told Glenn Beck on his podcast released this weekend. Dozens of senior attorneys in the division have been reassigned to other roles or taken severance packages in the last few weeks. Ms. Dhillon, though, dismisses headlines about a “bloodbath.”“Now over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do, and I think that’s fine,” Ms. Dhillon said. “We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute police departments based on statistical evidence or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence.”“This isn’t a personal passion department,” Ms. Dhillon said. “There’s some who looked at the memos I sent out saying this is a new priority and they’re like, ‘We’re not doing that. We’re doing this other thing.’ And I said, ‘That’s not on offer anymore. There’s no menu. This is not McDonald’s.’”Who is Ms. Dhillon, now the second most powerful female prosecutor in the country?Born in India and raised mainly in rural northern California, Ms. Dhillon made a name for herself as a tenacious attorney taking high-profile, culture war legal cases.She represented detransitioner Chloe Cole in her lawsuit against Kaiser Permanente for facilitating Ms. Chole’s chemical and surgical transition as a minor. She represented a former Google employee, James Damore, who was fired for sending a memo outlining why women are less biologically inclined to work in tech. She represented journalist Andy Gno after he was attacked by members of Antifa in Portland.A San Francisco resident prior to taking her current job, Ms. Dhillon filed numerous lawsuits against the state of California for its Covid restrictions. She rose in GOP politics to become the vice chairwoman of the California Republican Party. She also made an unsuccessful and highly contentious bid in 2023 to unseat Ronna McDaniel as chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.During her failed bid to take over the RNC, Ms. Dhillon faced nasty backlash over her Indian heritage. After she performed a Sikh prayer at the 2024 Republican National Convention, she faced similar anti-Indian sentiment from some in the online right. She also ran a knitting business on the side and posts about her sweaters and hats on Instagram.Ms. Dhillon has become a close Trump ally in recent years. She served as one of the “Lawyers for Trump” during the 2020 election. The American Civil Liberties Union and many civil rights nonprofits decried her nomination to head the Civil Rights Division, calling Ms. Dhillon an election denier and citing her “persistent attacks against transgender people, their rights, and their health care.”“It is a complete upending of the whole sort of historical purpose, the whole framework of all the various civil rights statutes the DOJ enforces,” Mr. Zisser says of Ms. Dhillon’s directives. “White people are supposedly being excluded by DEI programs? Nonsense.”“Cis girls are not having access because a smattering of transgender students dare to participate on equal terms? Ridiculous,” Mr. Zisser says of the sports issue. He says as a Jew he worries about the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus speech. He calls the division’s latest actions, “punching down.”“This is an abdication of what the division was designed to do,” a former Civil Rights Division attorney who resigned and now runs Justice Connection, Stacey Young, says. “The American people will start seeing devastating instances of discriminatory and unconstitutional conduct go unchecked.”Supporters of Ms. Dhillon, though, say that this reorganization of the Civil Rights Division is a necessary corrective after years of overzealous prosecutions of pro-life protesters and police, a focus on transgender discrimination at the expense of women, and the enforcement of DEI regulations that resulted in reverse discrimination instead of colorblindness. Ms. Dhillon told Glenn Beck she is dismissing 50-year-old consent decrees involving desegregation and decades old cases where all the players involved have long passed. She says this will free up resources on both ends to prosecute current civil rights violations.“Nobody wanted to be the lawyer who is dismissing a desegregation case or discrimination case. I’m happy to do it,” Ms. Dhillon said. “They had to have a Civil Rights Act of this country because we had a history of discrimination. Let’s not sugarcoat it, but it’s 2025.”This brashness, though, may be the problem, a Democratic strategist, Hank Sheinkopf, tells the Sun. Ms. Dhillon is certainly ruffling feathers, though her supporters say that’s a good thing and long overdue. “This is an example of the brashness of the Trump administration, where change is not gradual but it’s forced,” Mr. Sheinkopf says. “It becomes excessive and gives the Trump administration’s enemies more fuel for their own fire.”

Who Is Harmeet Dhillon, the Woman Upending the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division?

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