Nominations for attorney general and FBI director grab the headlines for good reason. Yet there are few jobs, not just in the Justice Department but in the federal government, that affect the lives of Americans more than does the assistant attorney general for DOJ’s Civil Rights Division (CRD).
To fill this key post, President-elect Trump has tapped Harmeet K. Dhillon, a veteran civil rights litigator from California. In Republican political circles, where she’s been active throughout the Trump era, Dhillon is regarded as smart, articulate, and tough. She will need all those attributes as she enters the belly of this beast.
The CRD has served as the cutting edge of woke-progressive lawfare through the Obama and Biden administrations. If she is confirmed, Dhillon will inherit a staff of career prosecutors teeming with social justice warriors unabashedly committed to progressive identity politics.
In their view, the civil rights laws are not what they appear to be textually — race-neutral safeguards that protect all Americans from discrimination based on such characteristics as race, ethnicity, sex, and religious faith. Instead, they champion DEI — the noxious ideology behind the euphonious label of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” — and consider it a license to impose precisely the kind of discriminatory regime the civil rights laws are meant to forbid.
The Obama and Biden Justice Departments have used these laws to privilege identity groups favored by Democrats over other Americans and to impose their progressive vision of policing on jurisdictions around the country.
It is expected that, upon taking office, President Trump’s flurry of first acts will include reinstituting his first-term executive order, later reversed by Biden, that would enable him to remove more easily executive branch employees who enjoy civil service protection, such as career prosecutors. Naturally, such a move will instantly be challenged in lawsuits, which could tie it up for months or longer.
In the meantime, Dhillon, along with prospective attorney general Pam Bondi and Trump’s other Justice Department appointees, must be ready on Day One with a plan to implement a new color-blind, nondiscrimination philosophy at the CRD, identify the staffers who will execute that approach, and marginalize any prosecutors who balk. That means Trump’s nominees need to study the department carefully now so they are ready to make an immediate impact.
As we are seeing around the country, major corporations and universities are scrapping their DEI programs. That’s not out of the goodness of their hearts; it’s due to legal vulnerability. It is a violation of civil rights law to engage in racial discrimination in contracting and hiring, and the Supreme Court has proscribed racial discrimination in school admissions. Dhillon must ensure that the CRD switches over to the correct side of these controversies.
The Justice Department’s civil law jurisdiction is essentially limited to components of government, particularly at the state level, that practice invidious forms of discrimination. That, however, is a target-rich environment. Like the Biden-era federal government, several blue-state governments have created lavishly funded DEI initiatives in an effort to supplant a core American principle, equality of opportunity, with the toxic notion of equity — hiring and contracting quotas based on identity politics are the inevitable result.
Also, addressing the scourge of antisemitism must be at the top of Dhillon’s agenda. Congressional statutes outlaw conspiracies to intimidate people in the enjoyment of their federal rights. The Biden DOJ and big-city progressive prosecutors have turned a blind eye to the shocking harassment of Jewish students on university campuses and the vandalizing of synagogues and other Jewish centers in intimidation campaigns against Jewish communities. That has to end, and federal prosecutors have more than adequate legal tools to ensure that it does.
There will be much more on Dhillon’s plate. She should restore the premise that free speech is a civil right that the government must protect; bolster, rather than undermine, voter-integrity laws that are vital to free and fair elections; re-establish the understanding of asylum for foreigners as a privilege granted by a nation’s government at its discretion, not as a right of access to a legal process that every non-American the world over may illegally enter our nation to exploit; and scrutinize the CRD’s proliferation of “pattern or practice” discrimination lawsuits, by which DOJ, with its bottomless budget, bludgeons municipalities and their police forces into signing consent decrees that put local law enforcement under federal monitoring.
Finally, how about a nice tone-setter? Perhaps Dhillon could begin her tenure by dropping the outrageous prosecution of Dr. Eithan Haim for the “crime” of transgressing the Biden DOJ’s transgender dogma by blowing the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital. As our Ed Whelan has extensively covered, TCH falsely assured the public that it had shut down its monstrous “gender affirming” treatment of children. Ending the pursuit of Haim would be a worthy message to the nation and to Harmeet Dhillon’s Civil Rights Division subordinates that there’s a new sheriff in town.