This position requires Senate confirmation
Summary:
Harmeet Kaur Dhillon, Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, has defended far-right causes through her law firm Dhillon Law Group Inc. In her college days, she was the editor of the conservative publication, The Dartmouth Review, where she became embroiled in a scandal involving an antisemitic column that compared conservatives on campus to Jews in the Holocaust, and the university president to Hitler. After graduating, Dhillon climbed the ranks of the Republican National Committee (RNC) until she came into the orbit of the Trump administration. Under the auspices of her law firm, she and her colleagues provided legal counsel to Trump and defended him in several high-profile cases, including the U.S. Supreme Court case that decided in favor of Trump after the state of Colorado attempted to remove him from the ballot for his role in the January 6 insurrection. In 2020, Dhillon called for the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and help Trump win the presidential election, and in 2023, claimed that Democrats were secretly conspiring to commit “the biggest election interference fraud in world history.” Dhillon Law Group has also taken up a number of cases defending Trump supporters and other far-right activists, and has been at the forefront of challenging gender-affirming care and rights for trans people.
In Her Own Words:
“Democrats are conspiring to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history, right before our eyes, as government officials avert their eyes to the mockery of the constitution and our laws. This is a low point in American history.”
- Harmeet K. Dhillon, Twitter, December 29, 2023
“Consider first the raid’s [on Mar-a-Lago] timing. President Biden’s approval ratings have been abysmal, and it is a mid-term election year. Bloomberg reports that the DOJ will likely delay ‘charging’ Trump with anything arising from the raid on his home until after the midterms. The effect of this is to create a cloud of perceived guilt running up to November 8, and use that as a political tool to smear pro-Trump voters and candidates. The DOJ hides behind its longstanding policy of not taking politically portentous actions close to an election—but how could the raid itself be construed as anything but such a portentous action?”
- Harmeet K. Dhillon, “The Politicization of the Department of Justice,” Imprimis, vol. 51, N. 8, August 2022
“Kaiser continues to engage in the quackery of subjecting innocent children to irreversible sex mimicry treatment, including drugs and surgery, without informed consent. The medical providers responsible for Layla’s case, along with countless others, have substituted woke ideology for medically accepted standards of care, including lying to and manipulating vulnerable patients and families. We are committed to holding them accountable for the harm inflicted upon Layla, and together we intend to strongly deter Kaiser’s factory-line approach that permanently mutilates an unknown number of American children, subjecting them to a lifetime of harm, regret, and medical consequences.”
- Harmeet Dhillon, Layla Jane v. Kaiser Hospital Foundation, Inc.
Background
Harmeet Dhillon is the daughter of an immigrant family of the Sikh faith from Chandigarh, India. As an elementary school student in North Carolina, her mother once spoke with her school’s principal about a Christian prayer the students were supposed to recite every morning after Dhillon stated that she was uncomfortable doing so. The school then changed its policy.
Dhillon began her legal career as a clerk for Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Paul V. Niemeyer from September 1993 to July 1994, and worked with a handful of different law firms for the next decade before founding her own in 2004. From 2002 to 2005, Dhillon also sat on the board of the northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from where she defended the rights of the Sikh community following the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
Regardless of her ACLU stint, Dhillon moved into far-right circles while in college when she joined The Dartmouth Review first as a writer then as editor-in-chief, and became embroiled in controversies related to the columns they published. This included an infamous satirical column comparing the then-president of the college, who is Jewish, to Hitler, and compared perceived “discrimination” of conservative voices on campus to the Final Solution. Over time, Dhillon pivoted more and more toward supporting far-right causes that would lead her to becoming nominated to lead the Civil Rights Division in the second Trump administration.
In 2004, Dhillon founded Dhillon Law Group, Inc., in San Francisco. The firm has taken on a large number of cases involving causes important to the far right. These have included support for “detransitioners” and anti-trans activists, legal support for Trump and members of the MAGA movement, and supporting lawsuits on behalf of far-right activists such as anti-antifa “reporter” Andy Ngo and James O’Keefe, previously of Project Veritas, a far-right outfit known for infiltrating liberal organizations. In 2018, she launched the nonprofit Center for American Liberty to support these legal efforts.
Dhillon has also been active in Republican politics since 2008 when she first unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the California Assembly. Since then, she climbed the ranks of the Republican Party apparatus, becoming a board member for the California Republican Party in 2013, and a national Committeewoman for the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 2016. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Dhillon gave an opening Sikh prayer in Punjabi.
During the coronavirus pandemic, she became popular on Fox News and social media for legal challenges to stay-at-home orders issued by California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Despite this support for Trump and the MAGA movement, Dhillon has faced opposition due to her Sikh faith, which has clashed on several occasions with the more Christian Nationalist factions of the party. When she challenged Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel for her position in 2022, supporters of McDaniel and election denialist Mike Lindell, who also ran for the position, quietly ran a bigoted campaign against her, pointing to her Indian heritage, which would contribute to her losing the contest. One email in support of Lindell stated: “She is an Indian Sikh by birth and heritage, Not of Judeo-Christian worldview … None of these core character positions aligns with the Republican Party Platform, planks, or conservatism in general.” At the 2024 Republican National Convention (RNC), she again gave a Sikh prayer which resulted in a racist backlash from Holocaust denier and Trump supporter Nick Fuentes, the far-right, conspiracy theorist Stew Peters, anti-LGBTQ+ QAnon supporter Lauren Witzke, and others who considered it “blasphemous.”
On December 14, 2024, Dhillon was nominated for the position of Assistant Attorney General, specifically to lead the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division alongside Attorney General appointee Pam Bondi.
Early career
Dhillon began her career in right-wing circles while studying at Dartmouth College as a writer at the conservative publication The Dartmouth Review. Aside from being a conservative outlet where election denier Dinesh D’Souza, Fox News host Laura Ingraham, and other conservatives cut their teeth, The Review had been previously known for repeated scandals and targeting of minority groups including women, LGBTQ+ people, and Black people. In 1982, the Review ran a column that implied that Black people were illiterate, writing in a style it claimed was “Black English” titled “Dis Sho’ Ain’t No Jive, Bro.” Members of the Review also levelled encampments of anti-apartheid protesters on the lawns of their university, published the transcript of the college’s Gay Student Association that they taped in secret, and labeled programs such as women’s studies and Afro-American studies as “victim studies.” D’Souza also published a “lighthearted interview with a former Klan leader,” complete with a staged photo of a Black person hanging from a tree.
Dhillon would later become the publication’s editor-in-chief sometime around 1988, and during that time, an antisemitic, satirical column was published which criticized the then-president of the college, James O. Freedman, who is Jewish, for perceived discriminatory policies against conservatives on campus, likening the campus experience for conservatives to the Holocaust and the Final Solution. Published on October 19, 1988 and entitled, “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Freedman” (One Realm, One People, One Freedman), a reference to a famous slogan from Hitler, the article made the claim that Freedman had used his power to find a “a ‘Final Solution’ to the Conservative Problem,” picturing him in a Nazi uniform. Speaking to The New York Times, Dhillon denied that the claims in the column, which downplayed the severity of the Holocaust, were antisemitic, and stated that the journal had sought to compare “liberal fascism” to earlier forms of fascism.
Legal Activism for Trump and the MAGA Movement
During the first Trump administration, Dhillon became prominent in San Francisco for providing legal support to Trump acolytes.
In 2016, she filed a lawsuit against the city of San Jose, Calif., on behalf of Trump supporters after they were attacked by counterprotesters, claiming that the city’s “inaction” was due to differences of political opinion. Another prominent case involved her representation of a Google employee who was fired after circulating a memo which argued that men are better suited for jobs in the tech industry than women because of biological differences. In it, Dhillon claimed that Google had put in place discriminatory policies that targeted white men and an “open hostility for conservative thought.”
Dhillon gained a national profile during the pandemic after she filed several lawsuits against the stay-at-home orders issued by California Governor Gavin Newsom on behalf of businesses and churches who wished to remain open during the pandemic. Of the more than 12 lawsuits filed against the orders in the Spring of 2020 in California, Dhillon represented plaintiffs in nine of them.
Later, she defended former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a gender discrimination lawsuit brought by a former producer and issued a legal notice on his behalf in order to publicly disown as a “scam” the Draft Tucker PAC, allegedly set up to recruit him to be a presidential candidate in 2020.
In 2020, Dhillon closely allied with the Trump administration when she joined the MAGA movement’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, serving as the co-chair of Lawyers for Trump. As legal advisor to the Trump campaign during the 2020 election, she called for the Supreme Court to step in and help Trump win the election, saying “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.” Dhillon sincerely believes that there was a secret plot hatched by Democrats “to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history.”
Source: Twitter
Dhillon, and Dhillon Law Group partners David Warrington, Gary Lawkowski, and Jonathan Shaw, were all counsel of record for Trump in the Trump v. Anderson case, which reached the Supreme Court in March 2024. The case, which centered around whether the state of Colorado had the right to remove Trump from the ballot for his role in organizing the January 6 Capitol insurrection, was decided unanimously in favor of Trump.
In October 2024, prior to the presidential election, Dhillon was nominated to run the “election integrity” team set up by the Arizona Republican Party.
On December 14, 2024, Dhillon was nominated for the position of Assistant Attorney General, specifically to lead the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. In the announcement, Trump praised her track record of “suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.” Far from championing the civil rights of Americans, far-right groups such as The National Review have supported her nomination because of her opposition to “the noxious ideology” of “DEI” programs.
Representing the Far-Right
In June 2020, Dhillon’s law firm took far-right writer Andy Ngo, known for covering left-wing groups at protests, as a client in a lawsuit against “antifa,” a left-wing, antifascist movement with no organizational coherence. The case came after Ngo was attacked by protesters during a clash between a local antifa group and far-right groups, including the white supremacist Proud Boys, in Portland, Ore.
Dhillon’s law firm also represented James O’Keefe and Project Veritas in a case where the DOJ raided several houses of group members in search of a diary allegedly stolen from Ashley Biden, the daughter of Joe Biden. They were also active in lawsuits against CNN on behalf of Project Veritas, claiming that the media company had defamed them by misrepresenting why they were suspended from Twitter.
The Dhillon Law Group has many ties to the conservative movement. A partner at the firm is David Warrington, who was the president of the Republican National Lawyers Association from January 2019 to December 2020. He has represented Trump in cases related to the January 6 Capitol insurrection and ballot eligibility, and is set to join him in the White House as Counsel. He has represented QAnon influencer, and Michael Flynn, who served as National Security Advisor under Trump for 26 days and was dismissed for lying about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Other clients include former Trump administration official John McEntee, who led a purge of non-loyalists in 2020, sent a memo to former Vice President Mike Pence arguing that he could reject the electoral results of certain state, and contributed to the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian plan Project 2025, as well as the Stop the Steal organizers Amy and Kylie Kremer, in their cases related to January 6 (see Global Project Against hate and Extremism’s (GPAHE) outline of Project 2025 here). Other employees include Mark Meuser, counsel at Dhillon Law Group who unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 2022, and Jesse Franklin-Murdock, Dhillon Law Group counsel and member of the conservative legal group Federalist Society, who served as a campaign lawyer for the Republican National Committee in 2024.
Legal Activism for Anti-Trans Causes
Through her law firm, Dhillon has worked to oppose trans rights. Her cases have been against healthcare providers who provide gender-affirming care, and her firm has defended individuals who have made anti-trans comments. Dhillon is fully opposed to the current best practices for trans care as determined by a consensus of the medical community.
She has stated on Twitter that they should “make it unsafe” for doctors to provide gender affirming care, and completely rejects the reality that there are people who are transgender, instead, referring to “men pretending to be women” who do not merit special protections under the law. She has engaged with other anti-LGBTQ+ individuals on several occasions such as Chaya Raichik, known online as “Libs of TikTok,” whose posts have been linked to bomb threats against hospitals accused of providing gender-affirming care, and retweeted a post from her on Twitter with a mom claiming that a school had “groomed her child into becoming trans,” with Dhillon replying that “gender madness is everywhere.”
Dhillon Law Group defended Canadian anti-trans activist Meghan Murphy in a suit against Twitter for “breach of contract” after the social media company suspended her account in November 2018 for misgendering someone, and for a history of previous anti-trans comments. The lawsuit sought to prevent the social media company from enforcing rules in place at that time over misgendering trans people.
Her law firm also represented a woman in a lawsuit against Kaiser Permanente who received gender-affirming care as a teenager which she later regretted. The lawsuit, which alleged the woman had felt pressured as a teenager and coerced into receiving the care, sought to prevent surgeries and other gender-affirming care for teens experiencing gender dysphoria, to contest the medical consensus over gender dysphoria, and claimed that the chemical and surgical treatment the woman undertook amounted to “medical experimentation.”
Dhillon Law Group also represented Dr. Eithan Haim from the Texas Children’s Hospital after he leaked documents to “anti-woke” Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo. Referred to as a “whistleblower,” the documents claimed to show that the Texas Children’s Hospital was conducting gender-affirming surgeries on children in secret. Haim and a nurse, Vanessa Sivadge, were investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas for violations of HIPAA health privacy laws. Dhillon Law Group later sued to unseal documents that they claimed could reveal whether or not the case against Haim was driven by legitimate legal concerns. The issue subsequently became politicized when Republican Texas State Senator Brian Harrison called for an emergency hearing over the “child abuse” occurring at the hospital.
Since then, Haim and Sivadge have become prominent activists in the far-right scene on anti-trans issues. Haim and Sivadge were both invited speakers, for example, to the Heritage Foundation’s 2024 Sentinel Summit in August, while Haim was as speaker at the Family Policy Alliance’s Social Conservative Policy Conference (SoCon) in 2024, a conference frequented by Christian Nationalist and anti-LGBTQ+ groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Focus on the Family, and the Heritage Foundation.
The Dhillon Law Group has since supported other suits against healthcare providers on behalf of detransitioners in an attempt to roll back access to healthcare for all trans people. They have also sued schools which Dhillon Law Group claims have been “secretly” transitioning students “behind parents’ backs.”
Their record has been mixed. In Regino v. Staley, a case brought forth by both Dhillon Law Group and the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal group behind the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a district judge in California ordered the complaint against the Chico Unified School District be dismissed without prejudice. The case involved a student who confided in a school counselor that they “felt like a boy” and began using a different name and pronouns at school.
Another suit brought by Dhillon Law Group that argued that a middle school staff member “secretly convinced” a student to identify as transgender without informing the child’s mother led to the school offering a $100,000 settlement to resolve the case. After the student started using a new name and pronouns, the school complied by referring to them using their new name, changing their name in school records and allowing them access to a unisex bathroom, and did not inform the parents in order to abide by California’s anti-discrimination law protecting the student’s privacy and vulnerability to harassment. The lawsuit resulted in the sacking of the school principal, and two teachers who ran the school’s gay-straight alliance club, and a year-long suspension for the club.
