Harmeet Dhillon: the combative lawyer who will oversee the DOJ's civil rights division

President-elect Donald Trump's pick to be the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights is an attorney, conservative activist and Fox News personality who raised her national profile during the Covid-19 pandemic by challenging stay-at-home, quarantine and mandatory face mask policies. Harmeet K. Dhillon, 56, has long served as a key part of the right-wing culture war's legal arm and will now be tasked with leading the Department of Justice's civil rights program, which she is expected to reorient toward conservative positions on a variety of hot-button issues.

Corporate attorney turned MAGA warrior

Dhillon was born in Chandigarh, India, to a Punjabi Sikh family and moved to the United States as a child. She was awarded her BA in Classical Studies at Dartmouth College, where she "bristled at the political correctness of liberal classmates," said SF Gate. She obtained her JD from the University of Virginia School of Law, after which she served a clerkship on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. After joining a series of law firms working on issues from securities to employment, Dhillon founded a private California law firm in 2006.

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Dhillon worked with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in cases involving discrimination or harassment of Sikhs. Dhillon served as vice chair of the Republican Party of California from 2008 to 2010 and was one of San Francisco's leading Republican voices, which was the "loneliest job in politics," said SFGate. In 2018, she founded the Center For American Liberty, a legal nonprofit that maintains "nationwide network of attorneys to zealously advocate for individual liberty and to combat illegal discrimination," said the organization.

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During the first Trump administration, she took on a number of conservative legal causes and clients, including Google employee James Damore, who was fired after writing a memo which "which said that biological gender differences make women less effective programmers" said Time. The National Labor Relations Board rejected his claim in February 2018, ruling that "companies are allowed to set their own policies and enforce them," said Inc.

Dhillon also filed lawsuits against California early in the Covid-19 pandemic, representing "pastors, gun shop owners, protesters, cosmetologists and beachgoers" who claimed they were harmed by Gov. Gavin Newsom's stay-at-home orders and business closures, said Politico. After the 2020 election, Dhillon "emerged as a fierce advocate of Trump's baseless assertions of widespread election fraud" and asked the Supreme Court to intervene and overturn the result, said The Washington Post. She also challenged Ronna McDaniel for the leadership of the Republican National Committee in 2023, "seeking to make the party organization more Trump-friendly," said The Guardian.

Reactions split along familiar ideological lines

Conservatives lauded the pick. She is "regarded as smart, articulate and tough," said National Review. Dhillon is an "ardent opponent of the left and a proven legal fighter," and her appointment means that "Trump is seizing what may well be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to undo all of the damage" that the left has done with the power of the DOJ, said Jonathan Tobin at Jewish News Syndicate. While it is "not unusual for Republican administrations to significantly scale back the work in the Civil Rights Division," Dhillon is a "lawyer active in the culture wars" who is expected to target DEI practices and shut down investigations of police violence and misconduct in her new role, said The New York Times.

Dillon's nomination was met with hostility in liberal and progressive circles. The pick "signals an alarming shift that could make life increasingly difficult for transgender people nationwide," said Erin Reed at Truthout, citing Dhillon's work representing detransitioners. Dhillon is "one of the leading legal figures working to roll back voting rights across the country" through her involvement in cases "challenging voting rights laws, redistricting, election processes or Trump's efforts to appear on the ballot in the 2024 election," said Democracy Docket. Her career has been spent "eroding public trust in our electoral process and participating in a larger effort to undermine racial equity initiatives," said the Legal Defense Fund.