Blog Post

Harmeet Dhillon: The Department of Justice Nominee Coming for Our Civil Rights

Enforcing federal civil rights laws is one of the most important responsibilities of the Department of Justice (DOJ). However, President Trump nominated Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney fixated on weaponizing the law to encourage discrimination, to lead DOJ’s Civil Rights Division as the Assistant Attorney General. She made her career out of purposefully being the lawyer for people accused of racial and gender discrimination in a bid to undermine civil rights laws. Dhillon has meticulously built her brand as an anti-woke cultural warrior who takes pleasure in disparaging racial and gender equity in the courts and on social media. 

How can someone who has tried to eliminate civil rights and anti-discrimination protections lead a powerful federal department that’s supposed to uphold our civil rights laws? It could be that Trump is more interested in using our civil rights laws to attack diversity programs than to enforce them. Given Dhillon’s background, she is unfit to lead DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, and the Senate should reject her nomination.  

What is the DOJ Civil Rights Division? 

Congress created the Civil Rights Division when it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, legislation championed by President Dwight Eisenhower to counter racist voter disfranchisement. 

Since its inception, the Civil Rights Division’s purpose has been to fight against discrimination and protect our civil rights. The Division’s work is crucial to undoing centuries of government-sanctioned discrimination against women and people of color in voting, public education, employment, and housing. 

Despite years of progress, racial and gender discrimination are still all too frequent in employment, in housing, in voting, and in immigration. According to FBI data, hate crime cases have risen by 20% from 2022 to 2023. The FBI data also shows that 52.5% of reported hate crimes were motivated by race, ethnicity, and ancestry bias and 22.5% of hate crimes were motivated by gender and sexual orientation bias.   

The Civil Rights Division is a critical part of the federal government as it protects vulnerable communities facing discrimination. As it stands, the primary functions of the Civil Rights Division are to: 

1. Enforce various civil rights laws, including Title VII’s protections against employment discrimination and Title IX’s protections against sex discrimination in public education. The Civil Rights Division also takes complaints and litigates cases. 
2. Enforce criminal laws related to civil rights such as hate crimes laws and the Freedom of Access to Clinical Entrances (FACE) Act. 
3. Coordination on civil rights protections across the federal government by providing policy and legislative recommendations and assisting agencies like the U.S. Department of Education, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development with civil rights enforcement.  

The Assistant Attorney General has a profound impact on enforcement of the civil and voting rights laws and protections that are critical to the wellbeing and rights of women, girls, and gender expansive people.  

Meet Harmeet Dhillon  

Harmeet Dhillon has dedicated her career to undermining the rights of women, LGBTQI+ people, and people of color. She has used her law firm, The Dhillon Law Group, and her non-profit, the Center for American Liberty, to go after discrimination protections often under the guise of free speech. To name just a few examples, Dhillon has: 

• Defended people accused of gender and racial discrimination. Dhillon sued Google on behalf of James Damore — a former employee fired for saying that women were less biologically suited for tech jobs than men — for being discriminated against as a white conservative man. She also sued a high school on behalf of an eighth grader suspended for wearing Black face while spouting racial slurs against Black classmates.  
• Come after protections for trans youth. Dhillon sued Colorado and various school districts for using trans kids’ appropriate names and pronouns. She sued on behalf of foster parents refusing to follow discrimination protections for trans youth. She has also represented people who claimed to have received inappropriate trans medical care to encourage bans on necessary health care for trans people. 
• Undermined voting rights. Dhillon has repeated unfounded claims of election fraud on behalf of Donald Trump during the 2020 elections. She filed lawsuits in more than a dozen states to challenge voting rights laws, redistricting, and election processes. She even claimed that DOJ should force states to purge voter rolls.  
• Made disparaging comments on social media against abortion rights and trans health care. In an op-ed, Dhillon speculated without evidence that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe was leaked by an “activist clerk” who opposed the decision and then went on to attack abortion rights and advocates in her writing. Dhillon also came after trans people on social media by attacking doctors for performing medically necessary care for trans people as well as trans girls participating in sports. 

Trump made it clear in his statement on her nomination that he had picked Dhillon to carry out attacks against businesses for their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and to upend voting rights. Trump’s recent disgusting attacks on people of color and trans people through his executive orders directly align with Dhillon’s career of subverting civil rights. It cannot be overstated: Dhillon’s work undermining the civil and reproductive rights of women, LGBTQI+ people, and people of color make her wholly unqualified to lead the Civil Rights Division. The Senate must defend our civil rights and reject her nomination. Tell your senator to vote NO on the nomination of Harmeet Dhillon.