Trump pick for DOJ civil rights draws blowback from advocacy leaders

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President-elect Donald Trump’s planned nomination of a fierce loyalist who has accused Democrats of election fraud to a key Justice Department position has alarmed prominent civil rights leaders, who warned Tuesday that her ideological views would take precedence over the enforcement of legal protections for marginalized groups.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s pick for assistant attorney general in charge of the civil rights division, is a California-based attorney and former state Republican Party official who has championed conservative opposition to corporate diversity initiatives, transgender rights and coronavirus lockdown policies.

If confirmed by the Senate, Dhillon would oversee hundreds of civil rights attorneys charged with antidiscrimination and voting rights cases, though she is expected to preside over a broad shift in enforcement priorities from the Biden administration.

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Through a private law firm she founded in 2006, Dhillon has been involved in cases challenging states over voting right laws, redistricting and other election-related issues on behalf of Republicans. She emerged as a fierce advocate of Trump’s baseless assertions of widespread election fraud in 2020 while serving as a legal adviser to his presidential campaign, calling on the Supreme Court to intervene in favor of his attempts to overturn the results in several key swing states.

Dhillon reiterated her unproven allegations of fraud in the lead-up to November’s elections, questioning how elections were being administered in Democratic-leaning cities in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

“There is a wholesale ignoring of laws passed by legislatures. … A few unelected bureaucrats, or elected perhaps, who change the outcomes of the election in a few counties and that changes the outcome of the national election – that’s what happened in 2020,” Dhillon said during an appearance in October on a podcast hosted by Nicole Shanahan, a former Democrat who became Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate and a Trump supporter.

Civil rights leaders denounced Dhillon’s positions, calling them antithetical to the mission of the Justice Department, which was founded in 1870 to protect the voting rights of Black Americans.

“Dhillon has focused her career on diminishing civil rights, rather than enforcing or protecting them,” Maya Wiley, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement. “Rather than fighting to expand voting access, she has worked to restrict it. Instead of defending election results and demonstrating concern for free and fair elections, for example, she helped fuel the ‘big lie’ in many forms, challenging election results on several occasions based on misrepresentations and outright lies.”

Dhillon’s supporters said she has a track record of fighting for conservative causes. In announcing his choice late Monday, Trump cited her work in opposing social media companies’ efforts to censor free speech, defending the rights of Christians seeking to gather for prayer services during the 2020 coronavirus restrictions, and fighting mandatory corporate diversity programs.

In 2018, Dhillon founded the Center for American Liberty, a nonprofit legal organization, to defend “the civil liberties of Americans left behind by civil rights legacy organizations.” In a fundraising email last month, the organization highlighted its work representing Julie Jaman, an 82-year-old woman in Port Townsend, Washington, who was banned from a local YMCA in 2022 after a confrontation with a transgender employee in a locker room.

Former Justice Department attorney Roger Severino – who led the Department of Health and Human Services’ civil rights office in Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021 – called Dhillon a “fearless defender of civil liberties and civil rights.”

Severino said the Biden administration had politicized the mission of the Justice Department’s civil rights division by failing to stand against transgender people participating in girls sports and dropping a federal lawsuit initiated by the Trump administration arguing that Yale University’s admissions policies discriminated against Whites and Asian Americans.

Dhillon, Severino said, “sticks up for the little guy as opposed to the special interests that politicized the DOJ’s civil rights division under Biden.”

Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the civil rights division has focused intensively on criminal justice overhauls, launching broad misconduct investigations into a dozen local police jurisdictions and prosecuting officers for allegedly excessive force.

The division has also increased prosecutions of hate crimes and violations by antiabortion protesters at reproductive health clinics. Federal prosecutors won preliminary injunctions against Virginia and Alabama over efforts by Republican leaders to remove noncitizens from voter rolls ahead of November’s elections, though the Supreme Court overturned the lower court decisions and ruled that those states’ efforts were legal.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson said Tuesday that Dhillon’s characterization that her nonprofit organization is protecting the rights of individuals not supported by “legacy civil rights” groups amounted to “gaslighting.”

“I am concerned with the approach this nominee will take as it relates to protecting the rights of all communities and ensuring equal protections to all sides, not only the majority,” Johnson said in an interview. “If confirmed, she will be sitting in a seat in which Americans would hope she pursues issues based on facts that are aligned with our Constitution and are squarely within legal precedents and not go and stretch that notion as the top person in the civil rights division. We don’t need to manufacture issues.”

Dhillon, 55, was born in India to Punjabi-Sikh parents and moved to the United States when she was 2 years old, growing up in Smithfield, North Carolina. She graduated from Dartmouth College and the University of Virginia Law School.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Dhillon served for three years on the board of the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, advocating against discrimination against Sikh Americans and others of South Asian descent. During that time, she made financial contributions to the campaign of Kamala Harris, who was running for California attorney general, donations that were criticized by some Republicans as Dhillon rose through the state party’s ranks.

Developing close ties to Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, she unsuccessfully sought in late 2023 to unseat then-Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, calling on the party to “radically reshape” its leadership – pointing to Republicans’ weak showing in the 2022 midterms.

Though McDaniel invited Dhillon onstage after the vote in an attempted show of unity, Dhillon told reporters that GOP leaders were no longer trusted by rank-and-file voters.

“The results were not what we – or hundreds of thousands of supporters around the country – were hoping for, and I think the party is going to have to deal with that fallout of being in a disconnect from the grass roots,” she said.

Dhillon has handled many legal matters for Trump, including representing Trump allies like his former national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, in his dealings with the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

She lost in a race for California state Senate in 2012. But she has become a national figure by taking on controversial legal cases in California, including challenging how public schools handle gender identity issues and parents’ involvement in those matters. She also represented pastors and parishioners who fought Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s ban on in-person worship services throughout much of California during the pandemic. (A similar case ultimately went to the Supreme Court, which ordered Newsom to lift the prohibition on indoor worship services.)

“What America’s becoming is very scary,” Dhillon said on the podcast with Shanahan. “These evil forces, the nihilistic forces, that have taken over many parts of the world are at our doorstep right now. … The way of life my parents brought me to America for is at stake right now, and it’s a one-way ratchet. It doesn’t come back.”