Few Trump picks have been met with more enthuthiasm from supporters than Harmeet Dhillon, who President Elect-Donald Trump selected to run the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) civil rights division.
With a track record that includes taking on physicians who performed irreversible transgender surgeries on minors and suing over COVID-19 policies that shuttered churches, clients and allies alike are confident Dhillon is the perfect choice to clean up the DOJ division they believe was behind the most brazen targeting of conservatives.
“There’s literally not another person in the United States of America better suited for this job,” California attorney and conservative commentator Kurt Schlichter told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “She checks all the boxes twice.”
When @GavinNewsom and the CA legislature made the insane COVID physician #ab2098 censorship law, lawyer Harmeet Dhillon @pnjaban shined a light for me showing a path of fighting it in the courts. She’s a righteous powerhouse and a jewel. Congratulations Harmeet! Let’s gooooooo!
https://t.co/Vu0jXn3jLf
— Azadeh Khatibi, MD, MS, MPH (@AzadehKhatibi) December 10, 2024
Founder of Center for American Liberty, Dhillon’s prominent clients include detransitioners like Chloe Cole, who Dhillon helped sue Kaiser Permanente for allowing her to undergo surgical procedures as a young teenager. She also helped one mother secure a $100,000 settlement after school employees secretly encouraged her daughter to identify as transgender. During the 2024 election, she led the RNC’s election integrity team in Arizona.
“Harmeet has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers,” Trump wrote on Truth Social when announcing her nomination. “Harmeet is one of the top Election lawyers in the Country, fighting to ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted.”
‘Master Organizer’
Sarah Parshall Perry, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told the DCNF that Dhillon is “a lawyer of exceptional capability and could not be better suited” for the position.
Under current assistant attorney general Kristen Clarke, the DOJ’s civil rights division has unequally targeted pro-life activists using the Freedom of Access to Clinics (FACE) Act. Several pro-life activists are currently in prison.
Only five of the 55 defendants that the Biden DOJ charged under the FACE act are abortion activists who attacked pro-life pregnancy centers, according to an August press release from Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy.
Pro-life activists celebrated Dhillon’s nomination, including her client David Daleiden, who was investigated by then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris and later prosecuted for his undercover videos revealing Planned Parenthood’s involvement in fetal tissue trafficking.
“Harmeet is brilliant,” Daleiden told the DCNF. “She is a master organizer who is efficient and effective. She is an excellent choice to accomplish President Trump’s mandate to stop the weaponization of law enforcement against the free speech rights of American citizens and protect the constitutional rights of all.”
Harmeet Dhillon (@pnjaban)—President @realDonaldTrump‘s excellent nominee for Civil Rights AAG—is the reason my CENSORED undercover videos finally came out this year!@PPFA tried to stop us last minute—but Harmeet got it over the finish line!!!
pic.twitter.com/3mY8PyJd3M— David Daleiden (@daviddaleiden) December 13, 2024
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▶️Dhillon should address the politicization of the FACE Act, along with “voter integrity laws” and “the roadblocks that Department of Homeland Security [DHS] has thrown up to make it impossible for state election officials to access DHS databases that contain information on aliens who are in this country both legally and illegally,” Perry told the DCNF.
During the election, the DOJ civil rights division filed lawsuits against multiple states that attempted to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls too close to the election. States claimed the DHS was preventing them from accessing a key database allowing them to verify voter citizenship.
“Dhillon should also direct the DOJ’s education section to step up and target universities that are continuing to racially discriminate in their admissions process in violation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard,” Perry said. “The Education Section should also be targeting every school that is violating Title IX of the Civil Rights Act by allowing men in womanface into women’s sports, bathrooms, and housing accomodations, depriving them of their privacy and of equal opportunities in sports and scholarship–the very thing that Title IX was passed to provide.”
Early in 2021, the Biden DOJ dropped a lawsuit challenging racial preferences in the admissions process at Yale previously filed by the Trump administration. Under Clarke, the civil rights division filed disparate impact lawsuits against police departments and fire stations, alleging discrimination when female applicants underperformed on physical tests and black applicants disproportionately failed the written tests.
“Principled lawyers like Dhillon want to enforce our civil rights statutes in a race-neutral, nonpolitical, textualist fashion — precisely as those laws were intended,” Perry said.
Harmeet’s team also bailed me out after Antifa goons tried to stifle my reporting on the streets. Great pick. https://t.co/KwoAzDcFOa
— Jonathan Choe (@choeshow) December 10, 2024
Amid pro-Palestine campus protests, Dhillon also indicated support for cracking down on universities over antisemitism.
“Sue Yale,” Dhillon wrote on X in April. “Sue every university that refuses to keep students safe based on their religion. Make them regret their choices. Deplete their endowments. Sue each and every violent protester and organizers. Drain their bank accounts. Sow salt in their career plans.”
‘Critical Work’
Those who know Dhillon say she has the leadership skills and qualities needed to take control of the department.
Dhillon is able to handle both high-level strategy and the technicalities of litigation, Schlichter told the DCNF. “A lot of lawyers can’t do that,” he said.
Center for American Liberty Executive Director and General Counsel Mark Trammell wrote in a statement that her “leadership and vision” pushed the organization to the “national forefront defending First Amendment freedoms, parental rights, due process, and the rights of de-transitioners victimized by the gender-industrial complex.”
“Her unparalleled dedication to these causes has not only shaped our mission but also gained recognition at the highest levels of government,” Trammell wrote. “It is no surprise that President Trump is entrusting her to continue this critical work on a federal scale.”
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