President-elect Donald Trump's decision to put the Department of Justice's civil rights division under the leadership of Harmeet K. Dhillon, a staunch loyalist who has participated in lawsuits against states over antidiscrimination and voting rights laws, has provoked a broadside of criticism from advocates who say that her right-wing ideology will be the dominant factor in her decision-making.
Dhillon, a former attorney and GOP official, has also championed right-wing campaigns against diversity initiatives, transgender rights and COVID-19 lockdown policies. In 2020, she served as a legal advisor for the Trump campaign and called on the Supreme Court to overturn the election results in several swing states.
“There is a wholesale ignoring of laws passed by legislatures … a few unelected bureaucrats, or elected perhaps, who change the outcomes of the election in a few counties and that changes the outcome of the national election — that’s what happened in 2020,” Dhillon said on an October 2024 podcast hosted by Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s former running mate. Statements like those have raised the alarm among activists who say that her views and actions are anathema to the original purpose of the department, which was founded in 1870 to protect newly-enshrined Black voting rights.
“Dhillon has focused her career on diminishing civil rights, rather than enforcing or protecting them,” Maya Wiley, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement. “Rather than fighting to expand voting access, she has worked to restrict it. Instead of defending election results and demonstrating concern for free and fair elections, for example, she helped fuel the ‘big lie’ in many forms, challenging election results on several occasions based on misrepresentations and outright lies.”
For Dhillon's supporters, her history and loyalty to Trump is the very reason she should be in charge. In announcing her nomination on Truth Social, the president-elect touted her work “suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers."
Though Dhillon has faced pushback within her own party over her Sikh faith, she can count on the friendship of prominent right-wing figures like activist Charlie Kirk, GOP money-man Leonard Leo and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who she represented in a gender discrimination lawsuit brought by his former producer, Abby Grossberg. In the ensuing settlement, Fox paid Grossberg $12 million.
In 2018, Dhillon founded the Center for American Liberty, a legal organizations that claims to defend “the civil liberties of Americans left behind by civil rights legacy organizations" and has spent much of its resources in suing states over trans protection laws, or in one case, a school that used a transgender student's preferred name. In 2023, she ran an insurgent campaign against then-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel largely on the grounds that she would carry even more water for Trump on his efforts to cast doubt in the 2020 election, including a proposal to hire an army of lawyers to challenge the election process.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson said Tuesday that Dhillon’s shots at "legacy" organization amounts to "gaslighting."
“I am concerned with the approach this nominee will take as it relates to protecting the rights of all communities and ensuring equal protections to all sides, not only the majority,” Johnson told The Washington Post. “If confirmed, she will be sitting in a seat in which Americans would hope she pursues issues based on facts that are aligned with our Constitution and are squarely within legal precedents and not go and stretch that notion as the top person in the civil rights division. We don’t need to manufacture issues.”
