A Trump-appointed Californian shakes up civil rights unit at the Justice Department
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- Democratic senators, including Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff of California, have demanded a hearing amid reporting that Harmeet Dhillon is radically altering the focus of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
- The senators have questioned whether Dhillon is abandoning the division’s mission to focus instead on issues that are important to Trump for political reasons.
California’s two U.S. senators have joined with Democratic colleagues to demand answers from the Trump loyalist and Californian now heading the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, amid reports that she and other officials have pushed out senior leaders and imposed hard-right policies at odds with the department’s mission.
In a letter sent Friday to Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, seven senators — including Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff of California — cited reports that Dhillon had emailed directives changing long-standing enforcement goals to employees, including in sections that are “meant to protect voting rights, prevent discrimination by federal funding recipients, investigate illegal bias in housing, prohibit discrimination in education, and defend the rights of those with disabilities.”
Those directives “may well be inconsistent” with the intent of Congress when it passed legislation standing up the division, the senators wrote, and must be disclosed to them for review by Thursday.
The senators also referred to reports that multiple career lawyers and supervisors in the unit have left or been reassigned, that none remain in unit leadership, and that political appointees with no experience with such work are now fully in charge. Dhillon and other department leaders, the senators wrote, are further diminishing the unit’s experienced workforce through buyouts and other measures.
“These measures appear to be an attempt to cajole career officials at the Division to leave voluntarily in order to fundamentally transform its work,” the senators wrote. They demanded disclosure, also by Thursday, of “all personnel-related changes” in the division since Trump’s inauguration.
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Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney, Republican Party insider and conservative pundit, declined to comment when asked by The Times about the senators’ letter.
However, in an interview with conservative podcast host Glenn Beck, Dhillon acknowledged being blunt with division attorneys about the expectation that they work to enforce Trump’s political agenda regardless of their own personal politics — which she said some did not like.
“We tell them, these are the president’s priorities, this is what we will be focusing on — you know, govern yourself accordingly,” she said. “And en masse, dozens and now over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do.”
Dhillon said she is working to find replacement attorneys interested in enforcing the law, “not woke ideology.”
Beck called Dhillon the perfect person for the job, saying she was “a machine” and “tough as nails.” Civil rights organizations had criticized her appointment by President Trump and Senate confirmation this month to head the division.
In addition to their letter to Dhillon, the senators wrote separately to their colleague Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri, the Republican chair of the judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, asking him to hold an oversight hearing “to update the Senate and the American public on these concerning developments.”
Schmitt, in a statement to The Times, said Tuesday that the American people “resoundingly rejected the left’s woke ideology” by electing Trump, and that he was “glad to see” that Dhillon was “wasting no time getting to work implementing President Trump’s agenda that focuses on enforcing the law instead of forcing radical policies down Americans’ throats.”
In their letter to Dhillon, the Democratic senators cited reporting from the New York Times, the Guardian and Bloomberg Law. In one article, the New York Times reported that Dhillon had directed division staff “to focus on enforcing edicts on transgender women in sports and other issues” important to the president, “shifting from its founding purpose of fighting race-based discrimination.”
The senators wrote that one of Dhillon’s new directives reportedly required the division’s voting rights section to give priority to investigating election fraud, “despite overwhelming evidence” that it “is a rare occurrence.”
A second directive “purportedly” required staff to investigate recipients of federal funds for “discrimination to the President’s agenda, which could lead to attempts to punish state, local, and private institutions who disagree with the administration’s culture war agenda,” the senators wrote. A third “evidently directs investigations of educational institutions to focus on racial discrimination against white applicants,” they added.
The lawmakers’ concern over such changes adds to broader alarm among Democrats, civil rights organizations and legal experts that Trump is turning the Justice Department into an enforcement arm for his conservative politics and executive policies — and one that is loyal to him, rather than to the rule of law or the legislative directives of Congress.
Democrats including Schiff and Padilla raised serious concerns with the appointments of Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and Dhillon, both of whom had represented Trump in the past. The senators questioned both women’s independence and willingness to split with Trump if the law required it.
Like Bondi, Dhillon has pushed Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. She has also been a cultural crusader against “woke” politics as a prominent member of California’s Republican Party for years.
Before her Justice Department appointment, Dhillon made a name for herself in California by challenging COVID-19 restrictions and voting rights initiatives, and by attacking California laws meant to protect transgender youths. In addition to Trump, she has represented California teen Chloe Cole, who is a prominent voice in the “detransition” movement, and Kari Lake, the failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate whom Trump named a special advisor to the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
Dhillon founded the conservative legal group Center for American Liberty, which claims there is “a coordinated assault on our civil liberties from corporations, politicians, socialist revolutionaries, and inept or biased government officials,” in 2018, and saw her star quickly rise in Republican circles as a result — with fans touting her as a rare champion for conservatives being victimized by liberal California policies.
Mark Trammell, the center’s chief executive, praised her selection by Trump for the civil rights post, and upon her confirmation said she was a “brilliant attorney, a fierce advocate for civil liberties, and is principled to the core.”
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After her swearing in, the Justice Department said Dhillon would “bring experiences and perspectives to the DOJ unlike anyone before her.”
Others warned that Dhillon would ignore the division’s long-standing principles and recast it in her own image by focusing on ways to limit rights instead of protect them — especially for vulnerable groups such as transgender people.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of hundreds of civil rights organizations nationwide, denounced her confirmation, saying she was “not a civil rights lawyer” and had “no business” leading the federal division.
“This confirmation is insulting, and it should alarm everyone that an election denier is now in charge of enforcing the Voting Rights Act, that an anti-LGBTQ+ activist is now tasked with protecting the civil rights of LGBTQ+ people in America, and that yet another one of Trump’s personal lawyers is now in a leadership role at the nation’s signature agency for the enforcement of our federal civil rights laws,” the group wrote.
Vanita Gupta, who served as director of the Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration, said in a statement to The Times that Dhillon’s moves to date as head of the division — and the departures they have spurred among career lawyers — are cause for alarm.
“This is not simply a change in enforcement priorities that comes with a change in administration — the division has been turned on its head and is now being used as a weapon against the very communities it was established to protect,” Gupta said. “The mass exodus that this has triggered is unprecedented and also understandable.”
Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.
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