The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department has historically played a crucial role in defending voting and other civil rights. Harmeet Dhillon, President Donald Trump’s choice to head the Civil Rights Division, has “a history of attacking voting rights,” according to Democracy Docket, which has called her “one of the leading legal figures working to roll back voting rights across the country.”
Dhillon wrote in a 2022 column in Hillsdale College’s Imprimis newsletter that the Justice Department’s power to administer the Voting Rights Act “was once necessary to push back on Jim Crow laws,” adding, “But the era of Jim Crow is long gone, and it shouldn’t be up to a politicized DOJ to dictate what election integrity looks like.”
Dhillon’s confirmation “would make a mockery of the concept of civil rights,” wrote MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones, who concluded that Dhillon “is just about the worst person imaginable to have in a position tasked with defending democracy and stemming real oppression.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 denounced programs designed to encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion in educational and economic opportunity as “invidious schemes” and called for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to focus on using “the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” that engage in what Project 2025 describes as discrimination. The Trump administration has already launched a purge of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from federal agencies, and Dhillon seems poised to carry the administration’s war on shared opportunity into the private sector.
Dhillon sued Google on behalf of a male employee who was fired after writing a memo that upset many colleagues by criticizing the company’s diversity policies and saying biological differences between men and women partially explained why there were more men in the tech industry. Dhillon’s lawsuit claimed Google was discriminating against white men. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2020 after the employee and Google agreed to end the case.
Dhillon’s record—CNN reported that she has shown “a hostility toward trans rights”—also suggests she will pursue the Trump administration’s already aggressive campaign against transgender people and their allies. “Increasingly, schools are pushing radical gender ideology on young students and social transitioning vulnerable children—without parental notification or consent,” Dhillon’s Center for American Liberty claims.
Dhillon is yet another former Trump lawyer being named to top legal positions. She was a legal advisor to his 2020 presidential campaign and co-chair of Lawyers for Trump. After the 2020 election, she promoted Trump campaign complaints about voter fraud and called on MAGA Supreme Court justices to get involved. “We're waiting for the United States Supreme Court - of which the President has nominated three justices - to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through and pick it up."
In 2022, Dhillon used Hillsdale College’s Imprimis newsletter to reach its right-wing readers with claims that the FBI’s carrying out a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago was “a political tool to smear pro-Trump voters and candidates” and “a vindictive and politically-motivated fishing expedition.” In the same article, she characterized people who took part in fraudulent fake-elector schemes in 2020 as “those who participated in the political process as alternate electors.”
In 2024 she represented Trump against efforts in several states to keep him off the ballot for supporting insurrection. She and her law firm have also represented other MAGA officials trying to overturn election results, notably Kari Lake, who fought to overturn her defeat in the Arizona governor’s race.
That’s not all. More from Democracy Docket:
And as a frequent counsel for the RNC and various conservative groups like Citizens United, Dhillon’s firm has filed amicus briefs supporting discriminatory congressional maps in Alabama and a fringe right-wing legal theory in a case from North Carolina. Both cases made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately struck down Alabama’s map and rejected the radical independent state legislature theory.
Dhillon founded the nonprofit Center for American Liberty, which claims to be fighting a “coordinated assault on our civil liberties from corporations, politicians, socialist revolutionaries, and inept or biased government officials.” An investigation by The Guardian in 2023 reported that the nonprofit paid Dhillon’s law firm more than $1.3 million while the nonprofit was also paying her a $120,000 salary for working two hours per week.
Dhillon’s unsuccessful 2022 effort to replace Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee was backed by MAGA figures like Charlie Kirk, who has called the 1964 Civil Rights Act “a huge mistake.” That same year, she seemed to promote right-wing conspiracy theories circulating around the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul.
Like a number of notorious far-right figures, Dhillon was connected to the Dartmouth Review; while she was editor-in-chief it published a column denounced as antisemitic for comparing the university’s Jewish president to Adolf Hitler.
Trump administration leaders have already ordered a freeze on all civil rights enforcement actions and told department lawyers that it might reconsider consent decrees the Biden administration finalized to bring reforms to police departments where investigators had found patterns of racial discrimination and civil rights abuses. As The New York Times noted, “During the first Trump administration, the Justice Department walked away from several high-profile cases involving misconduct by major city police departments, and lawyers who specialize in such cases have said they expect the second Trump administration to do much the same.”