Harmeet Dhillon: Inside Trump Admin’s Shake-Up of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] How is the Trump administration transforming the Department of Justice’s civil rights priorities?

Joining us today for a deep dive is DOJ Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the civil rights division.

Their jurisdiction includes a wide range of constitutional issues, from religious freedom to Title IX protections, race-based discrimination, and enforcing voting rights laws.

The views expressed in this video are those of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Harmeet Dhillon, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Harmeet Dhillon:

Thanks for having me on.

Mr. Jekielek:

There have been a lot of people leaving your division, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. What is the current status, and why is this happening?

Ms. Dhillon:

When we came in with a new government, of course, there were new priorities, and the president has been very prolific in announcing executive orders that really touch on a lot of the campaign promises that he made, but also touch on some of the reasons why the American people voted in a new government. There was a need for some changes of policy on a number of issues, and a lot of those happened to fall into my lap as the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, because a lot of these issues are fundamental constitutional issues that affect the American people. 

When I came in after being confirmed just about a month ago, a little over a month ago, in my first and second week, I got organized. I decided it would be a good opportunity to reset the expectations of all the people in the civil rights division. I will add that there’s been a time in our country for the last several years when people have been working from home, working remotely all over the country. 

One of the new emphases of this administration has been to get people back to work. I think that’s also important collaboratively. As we’re getting everyone back into the buildings where we work—we work in Main Justice as the leadership of the DOJ, but a lot of the lawyers work in another building—making sure everyone is on the same page. 

I thought what I should do is reestablish what our priorities are. I sent memos to each of the 11 sections under the civil rights division that I manage. I think they’re fully staffed. It’s about 600 people with about 400-plus attorneys setting out the statutory framework. Each of the sections deals with some federal statutes and maybe also a couple of constitutional issues like the First Amendment and things like that. 

For example, we have the Voting Rights Act under voting. We have the Help America Vote Act, the National Voter Registration Act. We have Title VII, which governs employment. We have Title VI on education. We have Title IX on women’s issues and sports and other educational issues. And we have Title IV that deals with certain legal issues. All of these deal with different areas. 

Under each of those statutory bases that govern the section, I explain what the priorities are going to be for this administration. Everyone needs to understand that there are laws, but there are also emphases within those laws. I don’t have enough people. If I had ten times the number of lawyers, I would not be able to cover every legal issue that’s technically in my jurisdiction, so we have to pick and choose what our priorities are. 

I explained to the lawyers and the other staff in the sections what the priorities were going to be. They were derived from the president’s executive orders as well as the priorities in the Department of Justice that Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the Deputy Attorney General have mentioned. So that actually triggered quite a few people in the department who have spent some of their careers pursuing certain agendas to say, “I don’t want to work here anymore because I don’t want to do that. I wanted to do what I was doing for the last four years.” That’s not how it works. 

The Department of Justice is part of the executive branch. It’s under the president, and so the president gets to set the agenda. As long as we’re hewing to what the statutory basis is that I’ve been assigned to do by Congress, it’s fair for us to change our priorities. Apparently, people didn’t like that. Quite a few lawyers and other staff took the opportunity the government was offering under this transition to take effectively a five-month paid leave. They’re still on the books, but they’re no longer working at the DOJ. That was really hundreds of people.

Mr. Jekielek:

Where are we today? The Washington Post reported towards the end of April that it was half. Is that where things are now?

Ms. Dhillon:

It’s about half of the overall staff, including attorneys, and close to half of the attorneys.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay. Please lay out for us what those priorities are. 

Ms. Dhillon:

I cited the president’s executive orders. The laws that protect the opportunity of women, young women, to have opportunities in sports are being violated by men being in those sports. I think everyone should have opportunities. That was the purpose of Title IX, to give women opportunities that they weren’t getting. Now men are taking women’s trophies. That’s one of them.

Women have the right to privacy in their private spaces. That’s an issue. Race as a proxy for admissions or hiring is illegal. We had a Supreme Court case on this in the last administration with Students for Fair Admissions relating to Harvard and UNC [University of North Carolina]. It’s been explicitly laid out by our top court that you can’t use race in admissions as a way of screening people out, and yet most of our top educational institutions are apparently still doing that. So that’s a top priority. 

Religion is a top priority. It’s right there in the First Amendment. It’s the founding basis of our country. I’ve been very passionate about it as a lawyer my entire career. There’s a federal law called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act [RLUIPA] that protects the rights of houses of worship and prisoners to not be discriminated against in their religious worship. We’re bringing zoning cases under that. 

Under the Voting Rights Act, the United States Supreme Court over the last decade has made some changes to certain provisions of the Voting Rights Act, but the prior Department of Justice was punishing states that updated their voting laws. We’ve changed our focus to people who are voting illegally, since we have bloated voting rolls all over the country. There are federal statutes that require states to keep their voting rolls updated. 

They’re not doing that for the most part, both red states and blue states. We’re going to be pursuing that aggressively at the Department of Justice. We want every citizen, no matter what their political belief or registration, to feel confident in the outcome of elections. Many citizens don’t feel confident anymore. These are some of the issues that we’re focusing on, but there are so many more.   

Mr. Jekielek:

You mentioned there was a law that was passed in Washington state that compels Catholic priests to break their seal of confession.

Ms. Dhillon:

The goal of that law—and we’re just digging into it; it just came out last week—is to effectively deputize Catholic priests as mandated reporters for sexual abuse or assault allegations. Of course, we take that very seriously as well. Our DOJ has been very aggressive in pursuing criminal charges against sex trafficking, Tren de Aragua, MS-13, and domestically as well. The First Amendment bars the government from interfering with establishing a state religion, of course, but also from interfering with people’s reasonable religious practices.

That’s a head-on clash between the legitimate interest of Washington state in pursuing criminal predators vs. the absolute privacy and seal of the confessional in the Catholic Church. There are similar religious doctrines in other faiths, but it’s unique to the Catholic Church that this is really part of the sacrament. We’re trying to understand and investigate what’s going on there. I believe that law may well run afoul of the First Amendment. 

If so, it’s a huge problem, and the First Amendment would prevail in that situation, in my opinion. State laws that violate the First Amendment are typically struck down by the Supreme Court. It is subject to strict scrutiny under a case that I litigated called Tandon v. Newsom, which went up to the Supreme Court and that was out of the nonprofit that I used to work at. The Supreme Court has made clear that when a government chooses to burden religious worship or practice, it must meet the highest level of scrutiny.

Is that law going to meet the highest level of scrutiny? That’s going to be the question that we’re examining carefully. Priests have told me and reached out to me about this law that they would go to jail before they would break their vows. Of course, most of us would go to jail too before we would break our fundamental religious beliefs. We don’t want the state to put people in that position, so we’re looking at that carefully.

Mr. Jekielek:

There is also the issue of race being a consideration in plea deals. 

Ms. Dhillon:

This is also an interesting case of a government worker saying the quiet part out loud. What I mean by that is, over the last many years, we’ve had very aggressive new prosecutors get elected into office with the promise of criminal justice reform, anti-police sentiments, and using their positions to right prior wrongs in our country related to race. 

Now, I think we can all acknowledge that there have been some horrific episodes in our country relating to race. I think we can also fairly acknowledge that those are largely in the past, with some exceptions. The Hennepin County, Minnesota prosecutor, Mary Moriarty, announced the official policy of her department, and she cast it in some wishy-washy terms. 

But effectively, the policy is that it is appropriate for prosecutors to consider the race of the offender in the plea deals. Again, the United States Constitution bars that, the Equal Protection Clause bars that, and the 13th Amendment bars that. The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that there are almost no instances in which it’s appropriate to use race in government outcomes at all, and even in most private outcomes, for that matter, but not all. 

It’s shocking that someone would get a different plea offer for committing the same crime based on their race. What does that say to the victim? What does that say to the public? We’re going to be tough on certain people and not others based on their skin color, which they can’t control. It’s an immutable characteristic. It’s also subject to strict scrutiny, that kind of analysis. 

What I’ve learned since sending a letter to the Hennepin County prosecutor about her policy, saying we’re opening up an investigation into a pattern and practice of illegal race-based discrimination in Hennepin County, is that this policy appears to already have been in place before she announced it. We have heard very troubling incidents of very lenient plea agreements that appear to be racially motivated. What I’ve also heard is that this sub rosa policy is happening in other jurisdictions as well. In my opinion, this is deeply troubling, and we will be investigating jurisdictions that are using race in sentencing. 

There was a time in our country, dark days that precipitated the civil rights era, where people were treated differently because of their skin color. Black men were lynched and hung from trees. There are some dark episodes in our country, and that’s what occasioned the civil rights movement. But turning that around on the other side doesn’t correct the sins of the past. It simply perpetuates these wrongs against different people who don’t deserve that. We are going to look into that.

Mr. Jekielek:

Thinking back to your confirmation hearings, you’re no stranger to this. Your then-husband was actually shot by a racist.

Ms. Dhillon:

Yes, that did happen to me. I was a newlywed in the early 90s in New York City, and my then-husband was a medical resident. He was shot on a New York City bus coming back home to the Upper East Side. I was cooking dinner. I’ll never forget that. I had to turn off the stove and rush to the emergency room. The Catholic priest who was on duty there said, “You need to get down here” because he learned that my husband was shot by a racist who took his shoe with his turban and shot him. 

Then New York gave him a slap on the wrist for committing that crime, which involved slurs about my husband’s religion. It was quite shocking to me. I then realized that justice is different in New York than it is in some other places. It shouldn’t be, but he got off lightly for what he did. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You’ve had some high-profile meetings with Jewish leaders talking about the issue of antisemitism specifically. Many people who seem to be well-meaning in many areas are not understanding why one would want to focus on antisemitism in particular at this time. What are your thoughts?

Ms. Dhillon:

Yes, you’re right. There are many people who are questioning why this administration is focusing on the issue of antisemitism, but it’s very simple to me. We’re focusing on it because in 2025 in the United States, Jewish students on college campuses, some of the most elite campuses in America, are being prevented from attending their classes by their professors and their classmates. Janitors and workers on these campuses are being held hostage by violent activists. 

There is a history of discrimination against Jews in our lifetimes, many of our lifetimes. In the modern era, not even a hundred years ago, horrific crimes occurred, and these crimes are being perpetuated in many ways. Some of the scars of the past are being brought up, and some of the imagery of the Holocaust is being used against today’s 19 and 20-year-old Jewish students. 

I’ve met on the Hill with members of Congress on a bipartisan basis, part of the Congressional Jewish Caucus, and heard directly from them how campus protests and campus incidents, and not just on the campuses, but Jews being barred from attending their synagogues in big cities in America, or protests that are interfering with their civil rights, are having a huge psychological impact on that community, and that’s wrong. It’s illegal. That is why we’re focusing on it. 

If something similar happens to other communities, we’ll focus on that too. Something similar is happening on those college campuses. Racial discrimination is also happening in admissions on these campuses. I think that’s a distinct issue. They happen to be occurring at the same campuses for the most part, so sometimes that gets conflated. But the anti-Semitism issue is a distinct one. 

My alma mater, the University of Virginia [UVA], had a horrific incident last semester. The students who perpetrated some horrific slurs against a highly distinguished Jewish scholar at UVA are still on campus. They didn’t get punished much, and the student wants to come back to campus and graduate, walk with his colleagues, and we’re worried about that student’s safety. I’m ashamed to say that I graduated from an institution where Jewish students feel afraid on that campus. That’s shameful to me. 

Not everyone’s getting it wrong. My other alma mater is Dartmouth College. I met with Sian Beilock, the president of Dartmouth College, last week in my office. I was happy to hear that some campuses are actually getting this right. When there are shanty towns and there are attempts to keep students from reaching their classrooms, some schools are doing the right thing and arresting people, whether they’re on campus or just off-campus hooligans, whoever they are. They’re being arrested because people come to college campuses for education, not for all this other stuff. 

Now, they have freedom of speech. Speech is one thing, but when that speech begins to turn to action that interferes with the right of a student who’s paying their tuition to get an education, that’s illegal. So we’re glad to highlight and see that some campuses are getting it right.

Mr. Jekielek:

There just was an incident at a Barstool Sports bar that is getting mileage this morning. Is that speech or is that action?

Ms. Dhillon:

I don’t know all the details of that. I was busy with work this weekend. But you don’t have unlimited rights of speech in a business. You have unlimited rights of speech in limited public areas. A business, your workplace, is not a place where you can bring your slogans that harass and intimidate other people. If someone is bringing antisemitic, racist material into a workplace, they can be fired for that. If they’re causing a disturbance, they can be arrested for that. If they’re inciting violence, that’s a serious crime. 

People need to understand that free speech means the government can’t prevent you from speaking in certain public places. It doesn’t mean your employer has to tolerate your propaganda in the workplace. It doesn’t mean you get to harass patrons and co-workers.

Mr. Jekielek:

There has been a lot of media over the last few weeks about basically taking away someone’s green card. There’s discussion about whether it’s speech or whether it’s shifting to action. Is your division involved in these types of questions, or is this something for the State Department?

Ms. Dhillon:

That’s not really our bailiwick. The small piece of immigration that the Civil Rights Division covers is our immigration section, which mainly deals with the workplace. It is illegal under certain circumstances to prefer non-citizens or people who don’t have a certain legal status over people who do in the workplace. We have that little slice. Most of what you’re talking about has to do with ICE [U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and Homeland Security. That issue is going to be worked out through the courts. 

As a former green card holder, my parents brought me here as a small child and became American citizens. Everyone knows that there are restrictions. It is not an open license to do whatever you want. You have to spend most of your time here in the United States and follow certain laws and not espouse anti-American viewpoints. That’s all spelled out in your green card application. Nobody should be surprised to know that you don’t get carte blanche as a green card holder to do whatever you want.

Mr. Jekielek:

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill ordering her attorney general to enforce federal immigration laws. Your comment was, “Oh, really?”

Ms. Dhillon:

My former home state of California also did this. They made some elaborate laws that had to do with where and when ICE could come and arrest people. We’ve seen two judges arrested in Wisconsin over frankly allowing people who were subject to arrest to get away or trying to help them get away, aiding and abetting someone being a fugitive. And so this is a fraught area of policy right now.

There’s federalism, there’s a division between state and federal, and then there’s obstruction. I’m sure that there are some very smart people in our Department of Justice and our law enforcement agencies and policymakers who are going to be looking at that. I’m interested in the issue because judges and even governors have declared sanctuary states where people who have broken the law to come into our country can do whatever they want—live, own property, and get driver’s licenses. 

California is like that. Many other states are like that. Eventually, the Supreme Court is going to have to rule on these issues. And eventually, Congress may have to tighten up some of our laws.

Mr. Jekielek:

You probably had a chance to look at this recent Harvard report on antisemitism. What is your takeaway? 

Ms. Dhillon:

You know, Jan, it’s a lot to take. You read it for a few pages, and you have to put it down. It’s so disturbing what students in America in 2023, 2024, and 2025 have to put up with—the slurs, the violence, the intimidation, the systematic othering of them, if you will, by the most storied institution of higher education in the United States. It deeply disturbs you to read that. It’s not just Harvard. It’s happening on a lot of college campuses, and I mentioned UVA. 

Mr. Jekielek:

But it strikes me as a very sincere report in a lot of ways.

Ms. Dhillon:

Okay. Now, what you don’t know is there’s one of two reports. There’s also a report that takes the same view of how bad it was for Middle Eastern students on the campus. You have to read those two together. I wasn’t there, but it strikes me as probably worse for the Jewish students just based on what I’ve observed and what I’ve heard and what I’ve seen in cases. But there’s a kind of whataboutism of putting out two reports at the same time. I’ll just leave it at that. 

I’m involved in certain campus-related legal matters that I can’t talk about today. I’m sure they’ll come out in the press soon. But there’s a lot of interesting tap dancing around some fairly shameful behavior by college administrators and what they allowed. I experienced it at Dartmouth as well. It wasn’t so much intentional by the administrators; they’re kind of caught between factions. 

One of the factions is usually the faculty siding with the agitators. Then there’s the students who, like my mom and dad, scraped and saved, and they want their kid to get a good education. There’s a lot of weakness in these campus administrators. That was true at Dartmouth in the 1980s and is true today at Harvard and all these other schools. You are seeing that UNC got sued by Students for Fair Admission. 

I met with the chancellor at UNC. A chancellor when, you know, some Hamas-influenced students tried to take down our American flag, marched across the campus with that American flag with those frat boys, and put it back up. Okay, there are campuses that are doing the right thing; they got the message loud and clear: we have to protect all of our students, not just be patsies here while violence occurs and open warfare in the streets. 

The UC [University of California] system is among the worst offenders. Some of the things you see happening at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles], there are lawsuits, private lawsuits about that, shocking behavior. So we have a huge problem in America. We need to come to grips with it. Every student, whatever their background—Middle Eastern, Jewish, Sikh, Christian, whatever—they’re going there for an education. That’s job number one. 

It’s the job of the campus administrators and the police in an urban environment like New York City to maintain order on those campuses. You cannot block people from getting to their classes. Professors making a chain and blocking students from getting into their classrooms. Shame on them; they should all be fired. You’re going to see the United States Department of Justice and this administration put a lot of focus on making it safe to be a student again.

Mr. Jekielek:

Over the last five years, your law firm was challenging many medical mandates. There are a lot of people who were dismissed from government, from private sectors, and from the military.  How does the Civil Rights Division fit into these past scenarios, and are they different from each other? 

Ms. Dhillon:

This is also a very complicated area. Believe it or not, the guidance of our Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is the main government agency that has the policy and enforcement of Title VII, which is our main federal civil rights employment law, they’ve had an opinion, the guidance that says that it’s not illegal for employers to require vaccination as a condition of employment. I’ve actually had a conversation with our Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC] acting commissioner about that. I think that’s wrong and you may see that policy change. 

Because, to me, basic freedom means that my employer can’t tell me to put drugs into my body. That’s a big barrier and I should have control over that. And yet, that’s the policy. That policy runs up against another employment policy, which is that employers are required to make accommodations for employees’ good faith religious beliefs. That is where you’ve seen a disconnect. 

Systematically, both government employers and private employers systematically ran roughshod over this basic, well-established premise of employment law. So there were thousands of employees around the country who asserted religious reasons why they didn’t want to take the Covid vaccine—pretty good reasons. I represented some in private practice in my nonprofit. I also helped some people. 

There are three members of the North Carolina Symphony who are still fighting. Now, a lawyer might be able to get fired from a job and go get another job. Where’s the North Carolina Symphony cellist going to go? There are limited job opportunities. Because of their faiths—I think two were Buddhist and one was of another faith—they were fired and they lost their jobs because their faith said they shouldn’t be required to take this drug to keep their jobs. 

To the extent that people are bringing those cases to us as cases of religious discrimination, we’ll be looking at those. But a lot of those cases have been litigated already; they’re already in process due to the timing. A lot of that happened during the Biden administration. But I’m interested. No American should have to choose between their job and their faith, where it’s a fairly mainstream position that they’re taking, which is, “I’d like to control the drugs that go into my body as an adult.”

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s a sweeping health freedom law that was passed in Idaho. We probably don’t expect to see some sort of federal mandate-type scenarios happening in this administration. But where does the state law end, and 

Ms. Dhillon:

The answer to that is it’s almost all state law. The United States Supreme Court held in the early 1900s in a case involving the smallpox vaccine called Jacobson v. Massachusetts, that said that the state has so-called police power over health issues like epidemics. Back then they were dealing with smallpox and tuberculosis—people were dying in large numbers because it predated a lot of the modern vaccines and health care practices that we now know about. So the United States Supreme Court said it was legal for the state to require people to get vaccinated.

This guy didn’t want to get vaccinated, and there was a $5 fine for not getting vaccinated. Boy, the penalty was much higher in the United States in the modern era for not getting vaccinated. You lost your job; you lost your ability to travel; you lost your ability to go to school. You were heckled; you were punished. People called you a pariah. People called you a vector of disease. It was public shaming. It was ridiculous.  

That law is still on the books in the United States, even though, in the intervening 120 years, the United States Supreme Court has come up with decades of elaborate tiered scrutiny analysis of infringements on our fundamental rights, 13th Amendment jurisprudence, and all these strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, and rational basis review. 

I did my first case involving Covid. I remember it vividly. I was sitting in my weekend home with my husband because San Francisco had shut down. I was arguing a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order to a federal judge in Southern California by telephone. It was an emergency hearing. There were no court hearings in person. 

I said, “Judge, this county is arresting people to drive into a parking lot and hear their pastor in a parking lot. Clearly there is no health issue, and that’s unconstitutional.” The judge said, “Ms. Dhillon, I’m struggling with the type of analysis I should be using here.” I said, “There should be strict scrutiny because it’s an infringement on religious liberty.” 

He said, “No, I’m struggling between whether it should be a rational basis review or deferential review.” There was no scrutiny at all under that Jacobson case, which said basically the police can do whatever they want once they say there’s a health crisis. That’s inconsistent with the law. 

The United States Supreme Court hasn’t squarely addressed that other than in the religious context. Between my law firm and my nonprofit, we won three cases at the Supreme Court on that, and we got the court to say that when it comes to religion, yes, strict scrutiny must apply. And that was a landmark decision, Tandon v. Newsom. 

But as to everything else, what if it wasn’t religion? What if you’re a business owner? If you were selling patio furniture at Patio World in California, they shut you down. If you’re selling the same patio furniture at Costco, they let you sell it. Where’s the logic to that? 

Businesses were put out of business. Inner-city kids in Los Angeles will never catch up with the years of education that they missed in person. Students had to drop out of school to babysit their young kids. People endured poverty because of that. Rich people like our governor Gavin Newsom were able to pay for tutors and pods in their backyards. 

But I think we’re going to experience generational retardation of educational opportunity and performance at work because of the wrongheaded discrimination and, frankly, hysteria that state governments engaged in. I have asked every member of Congress who asked me my opinion, “Harmeet, what can we do to remedy the loss?” I said, “Get rid of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. Do not allow states to do whatever they want to their citizens in the name of public health. That’s outrageous, and it’s inconsistent with modern jurisprudence.”

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re saying that you want Congress to pass a law that supersedes that.

Ms. Dhillon:

The Supreme Court hasn’t overruled it. That law, by the way, that terrible law, has been used to sterilize people with cognitive disabilities, Buck v. Bell, one of the most shameful cases in United States Supreme Court history. It stems directly from that police power that the courts have said, the Supreme Court has said, the states have. So yes, it is the states. When states like Idaho stand up, good for them. 

Idaho was pretty bad, I will tell you. Idaho and Utah, you think, “Oh, those are red states.” No. In those two states, the governors were among the worst, so it was not a blue or red issue. I saw shocking authoritarianism from governors of every political background during Covid, and I sued many of them.

Mr. Jekielek:

In a lot of these scenarios they said, “It’s with the best intentions. We’re doing it for your own good.” But this area of civil rights is where the most of the weaponization of government happened. Obviously, this is a top priority of the Department of Justice. The Attorney General has repeatedly talked about that. Is that your view?

Ms. Dhillon:

It is. I testified about that, and I’ve been very vocal about it. From voting rights, we have a very broad portfolio, from voting rights to men’s and women’s sports, to men’s and women’s locker rooms, to harassing the police and bringing pretty flimsy cases, environmental justice, my goodness, so many different types of cases that have been out there. The Civil Rights Division has been kind of a hotbed of one-sided activism, I’ll put it that way. 

I believe in the civil rights laws, I really do. I’ve been a plaintiff’s lawyer most of my career, been a lawyer for 32 years, and I think it’s great that in this country the little guy can go to court and sue the big guy under our civil rights laws and win. That’s the whole point of the civil rights movement is to protect minorities from oppression. That’s a good thing. But who is a minority has now changed in many ways. The majority can be a mob saying, “You have to believe X, Y, and Z, and diversity, equity, inclusion. 

It’s the minority who says, “Wait a minute, I’m an individual. I didn’t do anything wrong. Why should I lose my right to equal opportunity in the workplace because I’m white or I’m a male or I’m Asian and people from my background succeed? Why should I be punished for that?” We’re trying to take a race-blind and objective view of the civil rights law. 

One of the interesting things that we found when we came into the office, it was like in classical mythology, where in the Augean stables, there was a lot of stuff in there that needed to be cleaned out. We found consent decrees that the Justice Department had negotiated with school districts or police departments that had engaged in discrimination decades ago that were still on the books. They were still being monitored by a court. 

Some lawyer was still having to report on it. Worse, some fat-cat law firm buddy of somebody was being paid a million dollars a year to monitor some police department where whatever happened, some bad incident that happened, was over. Everyone who did it had retired, but someone is still making money off of that. 

We are one by one uncovering these little hidden grenades in the building and defusing them. We are dismissing consent decrees. We dismissed one in Louisiana that was over 50 years old last week. I signed off this morning early before I even got to work on dismissing another one.

Mr. Jekielek:

What is that consent decree? What does that mean exactly?

Ms. Dhillon:

A consent decree is basically a court-governed settlement agreement that has ongoing reporting obligations. It means that the parties have agreed that whatever happened was so bad that somebody has to keep an eye on that police department or that school district and effectively make them pay for the monitoring on top of that. 

They have to hire some poor school district that did something wrong 50 years ago, and has to pay some law firm instead of paying for books or education or after-school programs. It’s ridiculous. We want to let people off the hook where they’ve done the right thing. Now there may be incidents. 

Consent decrees are a powerful tool where there’s severe corruption, racism, discrimination. It does happen even today. Those are appropriate cases. What is not appropriate is to maintain these rent-seeking financial arrangements and court excuses to have things on the docket beyond their normal life cycle. So we are reviewing.

My order was to review every consent decree. Figure out whether it’s needed or not, and if it isn’t, dismiss it. So it’s one by one analysis. We have a bunch of lawyers carefully looking over these records, calling people, hearing from members of the community. 

What’s most surprising to me is there are consent decrees out there that the police department or the school district hasn’t asked me to get rid of. I’ve heard it from members of Congress or legislators or lawmakers in those areas, so we’re open for business. We’d love to hear from them if they think it should go away. If they don’t think it should go away, maybe we should examine whether somebody’s friend is the monitor. That is definitely happening out there too and getting money off of it.

Mr. Jekielek:
How would you respond to someone who says that the new DOJ is weaponization just going in a different direction? 

Ms. Dhillon:

Show me an example of that. I don’t think I’ve gone out of my way to persecute anybody, but I am an immigrant to this country, the best country in the world. I’ve traveled all over the world, at least I think probably 50 countries. I always come back home and almost want to kiss the ground here in America. How beautiful it is that someone from my background, from Punjab, India, can come here and succeed. 

That is all premised on the genius of our founders that we have a system of checks and balances and there’s no oppression of the minority by the majority. There’s a system where if something goes wrong, there’s another branch of government to correct it. I think that’s gone awry in many ways here.

But my job as a lawyer is to enforce the federal civil rights statutes, period, full stop. That’s what we’re doing at the DOJ, and we’re doing it with a colorblind angle. We’re doing it to protect those students who are being subjected to horrific slurs on campuses today. Tomorrow it’s going to be somebody else. 

Tides change and times change. Those norms don’t change, and our application has to be a fair and even-handed one. By the way, for all the things I’d like to do, I was just joking in a meeting of lawyers in the DOJ this morning that Harmeet is the idea person. I’m perpetually online and I’m open; my doors are open. I hear ideas from thousands and tens of thousands of people I know, and I have a lot of ideas. 

My staff has to say, “Harmeet, there’s only so many resources you’ve got, and we can’t work as hard as you want us to on all these things.” So we’re trying to get more people who want to do our work. Of course, there’s a current hiring freeze in the government right now. There’s a budget, and OMB has some discipline they’re imposing. 

I believe that the DOJ’s job is such an important one that we definitely need to make sure that at the end of this process, we get some talented people in. I know every division of the DOJ has the same issue. We have a huge mandate—human trafficking, drug interdiction, people coming across our border illegally, all the civil rights issues I’ve mentioned, defending the government from frivolous lawsuits. All of these different agendas are really important, and we need great people to do it. I’ve got a lot of people waiting in line who want to join this mandate, and it’s a very exciting time in America.

Mr. Jekielek:

Equal opportunity enforcement is what you’re saying.

Ms. Dhillon:

It should be equal. Yes, I think it should be equal. And I don’t think it’s fair. The United States Supreme Court has told us very recently in Students for Fair Admissions, the Harvard and UNC case, that it’s not legal to discriminate against Asians in that case for Harvard and whites. It’s not their fault they were born a certain way. It’s not legal to put impediments on their success. So that’s the law in America, and we’re going to enforce that law. 

Every day, I’m dealing with numerous campus issues where I think it’s no secret that the Department of Justice has its eye on the places in our country where their DEI [Diversity, Equity, and  Inclusion] policy has resulted in racial discrimination and discrimination based on national origin against certain people. We’re going after that pretty aggressively. It’s a top priority. I’m constantly on the phone with White House officials as well on these policy mandates. We are investigating, we are listening, and then we’re taking action.

Mr. Jekielek:

This is of particular importance to you, because you’re from Punjab, as you said, and you’re Sikh. You were able to overcome whatever discrimination there may have been around such things in this country. No country offered you the opportunity to be the Assistant Attorney General of the United States for Civil Rights. I’m not sure that’s possible in most countries in the world.

Ms. Dhillon:

This is the freest and most open country in the world. People are willing to give you a chance. They’re friendly, and they believe in justice. But it’s not perfect. I get slurs every day. I’m a big girl now. I heard a lot more when I was a kid. 

But the point is that we can’t use that history of oppression, which is there. We have to acknowledge it, including the Civil War and all of that. Doing the opposite is not righting a wrong. It’s simply perpetuating a wrong in a different form, so we have to get away from that. 

When you hear those striking words of Martin Luther King Jr. about his vision of a colorblind society, we don’t have that. We have an extremely race-conscious society to the point where Mary Moriarty of Hennepin County, Minnesota, thinks it’s okay to give a different sentence to a black man than a white man in a plea agreement because of their race. That’s shocking to me.

Mr. Jekielek:

It can also cut both ways. It could say, if you’re a certain identity, we could make it harder on you. 

Ms. Dhillon:

I’ve been a hardworking person my entire career. It’s the first time I’ve really thought, I really need to sleep less, get up early, and go to bed later because there’s so much to do in this job. There are millions of students in school districts today in America that are being taught that everything should be looked at through the lens of race. Everything. And that gender is a social construct, which is nonsense.

Sex is determined at birth. It’s science. Everyone knows it. Animals know it. And yet, lies are being perpetuated all over our schools. I don’t have all the hours in the day to deal with all the wrongs in the country, but we’re definitely looking at so many different things every day.

Mr. Jekielek:

You said it’s offensive.

Ms. Dhillon:

It’s illegal. It’s offensive at the basic human level, but it’s also illegal. There was an interesting case at the Supreme Court recently about a broad swath of parents of different religions who object to graphic and aggressive sexual propaganda being foisted on their children without their consent. This issue of parental consent is an under-mentioned and considered fundamental civil right. I call it a natural right, a human right. It doesn’t flow from the Constitution; it’s a natural right in mankind that parents—not the government, not strangers—get to determine the upbringing and education of children. 

I have personally filed lawsuits in California and other states about this very issue. Children are being groomed into sexual identities and transgenderism without their parents’ knowledge, and this is being actively concealed from their parents in violation of constitutional law, which says that only parents have the right to make these health decisions and these sort of fundamental identity decisions for their children. The state is usurping that from them. 

It’s the mantra of the Teachers Association nationally that there are kids, and we know better than parents do—these backward parents who believe in God and who believe in two sexes. We know better than them. That’s not right, so parental rights are coming to the fore of this Department of Justice. They are civil rights recognized by the Supreme Court. And so no state gets to usurp that from the parents. We’re really taking a strong line on that.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’ve been looking at people that are seeking to stop women from getting abortions at abortion clinics. Where’s the line in terms of what sort of activity is reasonable?

Ms. Dhillon:

This is an interesting statute. It does cover abortion clinics, but it also covers all clinics where people go to get reproductive advice, which includes pregnancy crisis centers, where people might go to get advice on their choices of adoption or keeping the baby and get some counseling, perhaps. It also covers houses of worship, by the way. A lot of people don’t know that; I didn’t know that. But the FACE Act [Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act] prevents violent attacks on houses of worship in the country. There are other laws that do as well, but it’s a focus of the FACE Act. That’s the law you’re talking about.

Under recent administrations, the huge emphasis has been on punishing non-violent activity under the Biden administration outside abortion clinics. People have been arrested, prosecuted, and sent to jail for years for praying outside abortion clinics. My view is that it doesn’t meet the definitions in the statute. It doesn’t stop people from going into an abortion clinic. It may make them think before they do, but I think that’s protected speech, in my opinion.

Now, there were very few prosecutions of actual violence against pregnancy crisis centers. By some counts, there have been 200 such incidents of violent attacks on pregnancy crisis centers over the last several years. The Department of Justice has prosecuted a very small handful of those. The vast majority of the prosecutions have been against people of faith, pro-life activists, praying and counseling outside these centers. And so I think there is a place under this FACE Act for prosecuting anybody who firebombs a healthcare facility or the home of a doctor. That’s what the statute was originally intended for, and that’s wrong.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s wrong that someone would do that, obviously.

Ms. Dhillon:

It’s wrong to kill a doctor. It’s wrong to kill a healthcare worker. It’s wrong to be a terrorist. Being a terrorist is wrong, whatever the focus of that is. But, you know, the FACE Act has just been used in a narrow portion, and it’s actually a broader law. I would argue again, if members of Congress ask me, I would say you need to tighten that law up and make it clear that it’s not appropriate, and it’s impossible to prosecute speech. Mere speech, mere innocent speech or prayer should never be prosecuted under the FACE Act, never again.

Mr. Jekielek:

What about talking to people as they’re trying to go to one of these facilities or maybe obstructing their path to those places? The point is there are different gradations here. 

Ms. Dhillon:

There are different gradations and each case is unique, so I wouldn’t want to prejudge how cases occur. But you know what I’ve said to people who have asked me, and there’s been a topic of conversation on the anti-Semitism issue as well. There’s a frequent misnomer in First Amendment jurisprudence. It’s like the First Amendment lawyers joke that the most dumb thing we hear is, “Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.” Hate speech is absolutely protected by the First Amendment. That’s the whole point. Most extreme speech is the speech that needs to be protected. 

But the question is, when does that speech translate into action and interference with someone else’s rights? That’s the million-dollar question, and every case is different. There’s a whole lot of speech that’s on the right side of that line, and there’s some speech on the wrong side of it, and that’s where the tough cases are. So we look at each case on its merits.

Mr. Jekielek:

You picked up a number of cases also over the past few years around people who were minors when they were given these various procedures associated with so-called gender-affirming care.

Ms. Dhillon:

Right. 

Mr. Jekielek:

How does this fit into the civil rights division and what you’re doing now? 

Ms. Dhillon:

I don’t want to prejudge anything that we’re going to be doing, of course, but my history is well known. I’ve represented three women in California and one in Nebraska who had their breasts removed before the age of 18.What we’ve learned in the process of those cases in my private practice and through my nonprofit, the Center for American Liberty that I founded, is they’re continuing to do that work, obviously without me. But what we found is the medical industry, if you will—I won’t even call it the profession anymore; it’s an industry—is trained and even by law told they have to affirm any wacky idea a child has. 

They think they’re in the wrong body. Thousands of children are sold the lie that they’re born in the wrong body. That’s a lie, and I don’t think that’s true. Then they’re given drugs after one meeting at a school with a guidance counselor that doesn’t have any medical training at all, or some psychologist or some therapist. 

Everything is affirm, affirm, affirm. No one pushes back on these kids. It’s a fad. We’re going to look back on this period of time as effectively the modern lobotomy. This disfavored practice that we now find to be abhorrent, barbaric, and inhumane is being done on America’s children in the name of gender-affirming care. 

One of my clients wasn’t even given hormone therapy before they cut her breasts off. It was like, boom. You think you’re a boy? They cut her breasts off within months after that decision. She then got hormone therapy after that. This hormone therapy destroys their bones, makes them infertile, they lose hair, they have skin problems. None of that is properly disclosed. It is my opinion as a lawyer that it is impossible for a child to give informed consent to these barbaric medical procedures. 

Now, we do have some laws on the books, a little outdated now, but the United States has a long-standing law against female genital mutilation [FGM]. FGM is, in my opinion, a barbaric practice that occurs in certain countries, not the United States, but immigrants from those countries come here and bring these practices, which mutilate the female genitalia before the age of 18. It’s a crime in the United States to do that. Now, the top surgery—and again, I’m getting very graphic here—but the removal of breasts is, you know, top surgery. These children don’t usually have bottom surgery until after they turn 18, for various reasons that I won’t bore you with today. 

So there’s probably not a lot of cases of female genital mutilation that are occurring under the age of 18, but if they’re occurring in this country, it’s a crime. The Attorney General has announced that we will be prosecuting that crime in the United States. The original purpose of that law was an ethnic practice. It’s beyond that now. It’s a pan-ethnic practice in America to do this to children. Should it be limited to girls? I don’t think so. Congress will have to update that. There are boys who are having their penises cut off under the age of 18. Who would have thought that? 

By the way, there’s a high degree of regret among these people who do that. That is why these procedures are no longer done in most of the civilized world on children. Country after country in Europe has discontinued the practice of gender-affirming care on children; they say it just doesn’t work. They’re not doing it for ideological or religious reasons; it just doesn’t work. These kids become adults with long-standing regret, suicide, and irreversible damage to their bodies. 

We in America need to wake up and understand that during Covid, where hospitals weren’t able to do a lot of the things they wanted to do that made money, plastic surgery, what have you, everybody checked the box saying this gender-affirming care on this child is a medical necessity. Fast-tracked to the front of the line. A money-making revenue center for strapped medical professionals. Abhorrent and crazy in some ways. 

A lot of this falls under the purview of state law. Some states have banned these practices. One of my former clients, Chloe Cole, has gone and testified in front of a number of legislatures. People are talking about extending the statutes of limitation now. This is mostly state law, but where there’s a federal law or a federal avenue, we’re beginning to send some law enforcement. I won’t tip our hand as to what we’re doing, but people who are getting the letters know what we’re investigating, and there’ll be more to say about that in the future. 

My other clients were Luca Hine, Clementine Breen, Layla Jane. But Chloe is among the most active young people in the United States. She has saved a lot of lives by telling her story and convinced some state legislatures to ban some of these practices and then testify in cases where the ACLU or other organizations try to overturn those bans.

Mr. Jekielek:

HHS has just come out with a report on gender-affirming care that some people are touting as a Cass Review for America. Have you looked at that report?

Ms. Dhillon:

I haven’t dug into it. I’ve been studying. I’ve read thousands of pages of these materials over the years, so it probably wouldn’t surprise me what’s in there. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m just wondering if this official HHS document will somehow help in your work at the federal level.

Ms. Dhillon:

It may. More importantly, we need to be equipping doctors and lawyers all over the country. Lawyers, unfortunately—I know everyone likes to hate lawyers—but sometimes lawyers are the only ones who can go into court and right some of these wrongs. Medical malpractice cases are happening all over the United States. Doctors committed butchery on children by lying to their parents and lying to the children. That’s a fact. 

It happened on the scale of thousands in the United States. It’s a tragedy. And I think that’s going to be handled by individual lawyers at the state level. But doctors and pharmaceutical companies are pushing drugs on American families that are not licensed by the FDA. That’s a federal problem.

Mr. Jekielek:

I was one of these people that generally had a broad negative view of lawyers.

Ms. Dhillon:

Everyone does. It’s okay, Jan, this is a safe space.

Mr. Jekielek:

But I’ve actually changed my mind over the last several years watching some lawyers doing some heroic work.  Why did you decide to take this path?

Ms. Dhillon:

It’s an accident of fate, you might say, or God’s design, I would believe now. I come from a medical family. Both of my grandfathers were doctors; one was a four-star general in the Indian Air Force, and my dad was a doctor. I grew up with a bunch of doctors in my family, women and men. It was a very respected profession in India. Being a lawyer is like one step above a shady used car salesman—really discredited, and worse than that as politicians. My poor parents, from their honorable background, lived to see their daughter become not only a lawyer but a politician as well. I was a longtime member of the Republican National Committee. I ran for office. They had to get over that and there was a lot of prayer in our house over that. 

But it was going to Dartmouth College at a time where there was a lot of campus unrest, and I was a young journalist. I went to Dartmouth at 16, fell in with that journalist Dartmouth Review crowd, and I experienced First Amendment violations. It wasn’t really the First Amendment in the sense that it was a private institution but it took federal funding, so we made some First Amendment arguments in court. 

But at the end of the day, it was on a contract basis. We had a student handbook that outlined the reasons that you could get kicked out of school. Three of my colleagues were kicked out of school for speech, and that wasn’t permitted by our student handbook. An ACLU lawyer represented us in court, and we sued Dartmouth, and we won. 

That was a watershed event in my life: that some kids could sue their school. This is a venerated 250-year-old Ivy League institution with billions of dollars behind it. We won, and I said, I want to do that. I want to be that little guy. I want to represent the little guy taking on the big guy.

You go to law school, and you have all these lofty intentions, but then you realize how you’re going to make a living. It isn’t doing that; it’s representing big corporations doing all kinds of things that I don’t agree with. The first decade of my career was spent doing that, chafing at the bit, and doing a lot of public interest work on the side, pro bono. 

Only when I started my own law practice was I able to actually make my entire career about doing what I wanted to do, which is representing the person who, without that lawyer, doesn’t have a chance against the oppressive machinery of the state and the Kafkaesque corporate bureaucracy that we have all experienced in our jobs and lives. I love what I do every day. That’s how it happened.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s a great story. What can we expect next from the DOJ Civil Rights Division?

Ms. Dhillon:

I jokingly say that at the beginning of the day, a lawyer will burst into my office, and I think, what fresh hell is this? Because every day, crazy things are happening all over our country. We have to triage; we really do. We rank the issues and say, “How bad is it? Find out more. Get the police department or the victim or the member of Congress or whoever brought it to our attention on the phone, get the facts, and then let’s analyze it.” 

Of course, things can sound horrible, and then you have to hear the other side of the story and figure it out. But I will say that some of the big things we’ve been working on so far have been campus issues, religious land use issues, and getting rid of consent decrees that no longer belong on the books. We’re doing housekeeping now and some catch-up. But every day, we’re open for business to hear people’s issues, investigate, and make a decision. 

People need to understand that the Civil Rights Division is, as I call it, the plaintiff’s wing of the Department of Justice. We’re not playing defense; we’re playing offense for the American people. We’re also not the full-service help desk for every civil rights issue in America. We don’t have jurisdiction over every civil rights issue in America. People are yelling at me on social media, asking when we are going to fix the voting problems and machines in their state. 

Guess what? You’ve got a state legislature; you’ve voted them into office. They have a lot of responsibility for that. They have the only jurisdiction over some issues, to be clear. Federal government jurisdiction over certain issues is limited. Within that limited jurisdiction, we’re going to be very aggressive on the White House’s priorities and on what the law requires us to do.

Mr. Jekielek:

About this equal opportunity enforcement, is this the end of selective justice? 

Ms. Dhillon:

Nothing is ever the end. There’s always the next person who comes along and may reverse every good thing that you do. But I think that we’re going to right a lot of wrongs. I will tell you that historically, under Republican administrations, the approach has been very different with the Civil Rights Division than what I just described. It’s been like, “Oh my gosh, they’re doing all these crazy things. Let’s slow that down and sit on our hands.” 

We haven’t been plaintiff’s lawyers. We haven’t been going out there aggressively and having our own affirmative civil rights agenda. Because there was no such thing as a bunch of civil rights lawyers with my orientation that I’ve described here in this interview when I came out of law school. I wanted to do that, but there wasn’t a law firm I could join to do that. There wasn’t a nonprofit I could join to do that. I had to make it up myself. But now, there’s something like that. Now, lawyers come and ask to meet me and say, “I want to do what you did for your career.” There are a lot more lawyers who want to do that. 

That’s why I’m not going to have a problem staffing up when we get that opportunity here at the DOJ. We are not going to sit back and just slow down the bad stuff. We’re stopping the bad stuff, and we’re starting the affirmative agenda that we have, and that is very, very different than even Trump’s. It’s exciting. This hasn’t been done before, and we have partners all over the U.S. government. 

Every day, I have meetings or calls with the EEOC, Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the White House, and other people in the Department of Justice. We run into each other’s offices and say, “Did you hear about this? Let’s work together on this. Let’s open an investigation into this.” It’s creative; it’s positive. It’s optimistic about how we can use the law to make it better for all Americans, and I do mean all Americans, without fear or favor. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Harmeet Dhillon, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. 

Ms. Dhillon:

Thank you so much for having me on. 

 

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.