upper waypoint

Trump Taps Harmeet Dhillon, SF Attorney and Vocal Supporter, for Top Civil Rights Post

Save ArticleSave Article
Failed to save article

Please try again

Harmeet Dhillon, trial lawyer and member of the Republican National Committee. Rather than compromise with Democrats, she says GOP state lawmakers should heighten their opposition.
Harmeet Dhillon, trial lawyer and member of the Republican National Committee, during a press conference at her firm's office in San Francisco on April 24, 2017. Dhillon has filed lawsuits targeting pandemic restrictions and transgender rights, and embraced Trump’s 2020 election denial. (Bert Johnson/KQED)

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped San Francisco lawyer and Republican activist Harmeet Dhillon to head the civil rights division at the U.S. Department of Justice. Dhillon, a longtime GOP booster who unsuccessfully ran for Republican National Committee chair last year, has been a vocal supporter of Trump — but she was passed over for this same job during Trump’s first term.

In recent years, Dhillon filed lawsuits that endeared her to Republican activists, including targeting Big Tech, pandemic restrictions like vaccine mandates and transgender rights. A favorite on right-wing cable news, she also parroted unfounded questions about the COVID-19 vaccine’s safety during its rollout as she became one of the most high-profile lawyers pushing back against the mandates.

And she embraced Trump’s baseless denial of the 2020 election results with gusto as a legal adviser to his campaign, urging the Supreme Court to intervene.

Sponsored

In his social media post announcing her nomination, Trump wrote that Dhillon 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.”

But civil rights groups like The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights slammed the pick. Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the conference, said her nomination is “yet another clear sign that this administration seeks to advance ideological viewpoints over the rights and protections that protect every person in this country” and that Dhillon has “focused her career on diminishing civil rights, rather than enforcing or protecting them.”

Dhillon was born to a Sikh family in India and grew up in North Carolina, as she told KQED’s Political Breakdown in 2018. The family moved to Durham when Dhillon was 6 — she said when the family relocated there, “We didn’t know what the [Ku Klux] Klan was or any of that good stuff.”

“My dad and brother wore turbans. And there was one other Sikh family and one Hindu family in the town, all doctors and their kids. And, you know, we stood out [with] our different names and, you know, different styles, I guess. And so there was a lot of bullying and teasing and so forth,” she said.

Dhillon said she was introverted and turned her focus toward academics, starting high school at age 12 and college at 16.

She became editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Review and often clashed with the school’s administration, turning at one point to the ACLU for help. After she got a law degree, she made her name legally defending Sikhs from attacks after 9/11.

“After 9/11, we had a lot of people being harassed, frankly, by law enforcement, FBI, national security forces and profiling. We had a lot of hate crimes against Sikhs,” she said. “It was life and death. People like my brother who wears a turban, we’re getting called Osama bin Laden at, you know, the Giants games. It was a pretty scary time for people of color from our communities.

She later sat on the ACLU of Northern California board for several years, but more recently, has been critical of the civil rights group.

In 2018, she told Political Breakdown she was likely passed over for the civil rights position because Trump’s team was looking for people with deeper ties to Washington — “what I would call the swamp.”

lower waypoint
next waypoint