Finally, the DOJ Civil Rights Division is going to defend civil rights, not create a social justice/authoritarian regime. The previous Civil Rights Division tried to declare church going Catholics, terrorists. The did declare parents that opposed sexual grooming in classrooms to be terrorists. Pray in from an execution storefront run by Planned Parenthood, you were a terrorist. But if you bombed a pro-life center, the government would applaud you.
“The priorities pursued in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division by her predecessor Kristen Clarke — prosecuting pro-life activists, suing states over election integrity efforts and targeting police departments — are going to change, Dhillon told the Daily Caller News Foundation during a Friday interview.
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Under her leadership, Dhillon said the Civil Rights Division will continue its core mission, while expanding to new areas of focus including defending the Second Amendment, ending race discrimination in employment, securing parental rights and fighting antisemitism on college campuses.”
Glad to see the Civil Rights Division is going to protect your rights, instead of killing them.
EXCLUSIVE: Harmeet Dhillon Reveals What’s Next For ‘Notorious’ DOJ Office That Was Weaponized Under Biden
Katelynn Richardson, Daily Caller, 4/28/25 https://dailycaller.com/2025/04/28/exclusive-harmeet-dhillon-reveals-whats-next-doj-civil-rights-division/
After the Biden administration spent four years “weaponizing” her division, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon says that she needs more “energized attorneys” to help her spearhead new initiatives to protect rights that have been trampled on in the past years.
The priorities pursued in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division by her predecessor Kristen Clarke — prosecuting pro-life activists, suing states over election integrity efforts and targeting police departments — are going to change, Dhillon told the Daily Caller News Foundation during a Friday interview.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
Under her leadership, Dhillon said the Civil Rights Division will continue its core mission, while expanding to new areas of focus including defending the Second Amendment, ending race discrimination in employment, securing parental rights and fighting antisemitism on college campuses
Some current and former career attorneys in the division are claiming the shifts in policy will undermine civil rights enforcement. Last week, around a dozen senior lawyers in the division were reassigned, Reuters reported.
“We have changed the priorities, not the mission, the priorities, in each of the sections in the Civil Rights Division,” Dhillon told the DCNF. “Some personnel here have decided that they’d rather make their careers elsewhere.”
WATCH:
The following interview has been edited for the sake of length and clarity.
A lot of Americans were concerned over the past four years how this division has been one of the most weaponized in the DOJ. What did you walk into three weeks ago when you came in?
The Civil Rights Division is one of the largest litigating departments of the United States Department of Justice, and you’re correct, a lot of the most notorious, headline-grabbing policies out of the Biden DOJ came from the Civil Rights Division.
For example, the Civil Rights Division was responsible for challenging Georgia’s election laws. The DOJ took it upon itself to harass Georgia over doing the right thing. The DOJ Civil Rights Division spent a lot of resources persecuting Christians for praying outside abortion clinics, not violently, not in any way obstructing people, just praying. That’s outrageous, and we’ve dismissed those prosecutions. The Civil Rights Division has been bringing and maintaining, I think, pretty flimsy cases against police departments and other law enforcement agencies for alleged statistical anomalies in arrest rates, very small anomalies. Statistics are easily manipulated.
We are here to absolutely punish misconduct by the police, by employers, by housing agencies that discriminate against people, by educational institutions that discriminate against students and a whole host of other civil rights statutes. There’s human trafficking, certain human trafficking statues come under our purview.
We’re required to enforce the federal civil rights laws. So all of that is going to continue to be done under the Civil Rights Division, disability law and all of that, but the emphasis is going to be different. It isn’t going to be on opening up investigations and harassing people endlessly and maintaining 40-and 50-year-old consent decrees. It’s going to be examining wrongdoing or alleged wrongdoing and determining quickly whether it occurred or not. If it does, we’ll go after it. If it doesn’t, we’ll move on.
More importantly, I think the rights of ordinary Americans over the last years have been stripped and violated. The First Amendment: during COVID, we saw so many violations of civil rights in every single area, which is something that I took on as a private lawyer. The FACE [Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances] Act can be used to protect clinics where women get counseling about their options for abortion, and 200 of those have been violently attacked, firebombed, picketed and otherwise been obstructed over the last few years with zero action from the DOJ. That’s going to change.
We have changed the priorities, not the mission, the priorities, in each of the sections in the Civil Rights Division. Some personnel here have decided that they’d rather make their careers elsewhere. So there’ll be quite a bit of turnover here in the Civil Rights Division.
What does that look like as far as staffing? Do you have enough attorneys to execute those new priorities that you’re hoping to focus on?
Love more. We’re waiting for, you know, throughout the federal government, people are being offered an opportunity to take severance that pays them for five months, and they don’t have to work anymore. They still stay on our books, so, you know, from the bean counter’s perspective I have all those people.
But reality is, not only are we going to continue the mission of the Civil Rights Division, the traditional, core functions, there are a lot of new functions that our president wants us to be looking at, and new functions that I want to do. For example, the Second Amendment is a civil right. The Civil Rights Division has never gone after states that systematically violate our right under Bruen and other Supreme decisions to carry weapons, to bear arms, to keep them in our homes. We’re going to be doing that in the Civil Rights Division.
I mentioned the FACE act, different applications of the FACE act. Rampant antisemitism on college campuses is going to come to an end under our purview. Employers that discriminate against people on the basis of race and use quotas in hiring that are in no way justified, public sector employers, will be getting inquiries from us, and so that’s a new priority that wasn’t being done before. That’s almost every employer in America, unfortunately, certainly in the public sector. We’re taking on de-banking practices.
These are all new things. I’m going to need new, energized attorneys dedicated to this mission. Once we finish this reorganization, and finish the severance process, we’ll be hiring again.
What are some of the lessons you learned from your private practice in the past that you’re bringing into your role here?
I am the rare thing of a conservative civil rights lawyer almost my entire career. So for 18 years, I had my own law firm. For six years, I had a nonprofit that I founded. Both of those, well, one, represented the president in his campaign and his personal life, and many prominent people whose speech rights were violated.
That’s something I’m very passionate about, the First Amendment. But during COVID, we saw every American’s rights trampled on in so many different ways. I filed more lawsuits during COVID than any other lawyer in the United States to challenge governors and local officials stripping away people’s private rights. So these are some of the things that I intend to bring to bear here.
I’ve been a lawyer for the Second Amendment community. I’ve been a lawyer for the pro-life community. Very passionate about all of those areas. I’m not here to do my priorities. I’m here to do the president’s priorities, which happen to overlap a lot with my priorities.
Another priority that Trump signed an executive order on is child gender mutilation and the transgender issue. Could you address specifically what actions you might be taking in the future? How you might be dealing with doctors, medical malpractice cases?
I can’t be specific because that wouldn’t be appropriate, but I can tell anyone to look at my record. In my private practice, in my nonprofit, I represented four prominent young women who detransitioned — Chloe Cole, Luka Hein, Clementine Breen and one other. These girls and their families were sold a package of lies. They were subjected to medical malpractice, and frankly, doctors looked the other way on their actual medical issues and put them on this conveyor belt. Thankfully, each of them realized they made a terrible mistake, and they’ll never get their breasts back. Thankfully, worse wasn’t done to them.
The president and the attorney general have emphasized that we need to be using female genital mutilation statutes that bar female genital mutilation on girls under the age of 18, a barbaric practice that we condemn around the world, but do right here in the United States. That doesn’t protect boys, unfortunately, but we will aggressively be looking at the extent to which doctors, medical institutions, public institutions, UCSF, and you know, all these public institutions around the country, have been violating the civil rights of American families.
Some states are systematically destroying parental rights, which is a civil right, by enabling the smuggling of children across the state borders to obtain this destructive treatment and surgery. That’s illegal, in my opinion, and it may violate human trafficking statutes. So there are a number of things that we’re going to look at.
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On the religious liberty front, I know you’ve spoken a lot about that. Earlier this week, there was a meeting of the anti-Christian Bias Task Force. What do you see as the biggest issue in the religious liberty space?
Well there’s so many. I’ve mentioned some of them, but I think there’s open hostility to religion in many sectors of our society.
We’ve had presidents mock people who cling to their faith. People who sought medical exemptions from the COVID vaccine during that terrible era, were fired from our military, were fired from jobs all over the United States. There’s active anti-Christian hostility in the military, in various government agencies. Chaplains are told not to preach their faith if they’re Christian. I mean, there’s so many things. Secretary Hegseth went over those at our meeting. And State Department Secretary Rubio talked about examples over there.
We have federal statutes that protect religion, not just the First Amendment, but there’s the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. We’ve brought several cases in the DOJ Civil Rights Division to protect houses of worship, Christian and others. It’s an important right that we have, and we need to protect people of faith, even in prisons. People who have committed crimes don’t lose their religious rights. I’m very passionate about that issue, and have spent my entire 32 year career working to represent the rights of people of faith.
On election security, I also wanted to ask you, what can be done about states that are allowing non-citizens on voter rolls? What role will the Civil Rights Division have in those issues?
We have a role. We administer the Voting Rights Act, the Help America Vote Act, the National Voter Registration Act. Those are specific statutes. What we are not is the all purpose law enforcement agency of elections. Americans need to understand that most of our election laws are based in the states. However, there are these federal laws.
As a lawyer for many candidates over the years, and having been a candidate myself, I’m very passionate about that. And as an immigrant to this country, I think it’s outrageous that people conflate immigrant and illegal immigrant and [say] ‘nobody should be asking for anybody’s ID.’ It’s 2025. Everyone in America who’s here legally can easily get an ID. So that’s nonsense.
I do think that we need to be enforcing voter ID laws, allowing them, enabling them and making it easier for anyone who is legally entitled to vote in the United States to vote easily. That’s the bottom line. So the hostility that we see from one side politically and from judges to this basic concept, we have to work around it. There may be legislative solutions that are required, but whatever we can do at the DOJ to make sure that our elections are fair, safe and reliable, we will be doing.
You mentioned judges. There’s been a lot of talk about district court judges overriding the president, a lot of the executive orders. What do you think the answer is there?
Oh, that’s the heavy one. And I have to appear in front of these judges, so I will not say exactly what I think about some of these judges and their rulings. What I will say is that we have a runaway trend of judges, you know, substituting their judgment for the president’s. That is not what separation of powers means. I’ll leave it at that. I’m involved in several active cases. I can’t really take a position any more than this.
Finally, what would you say Americans should expect from the Civil Rights Division over the next four years? What’s your final message?
Well, they can expect that we’ll be enforcing the federal civil rights statutes. They can expect that the emphasis of that enforcement is going to be more towards the president’s agenda. He has many executive orders out there that I fully agree with and he has a right as an executive, the person that the American people chose to be our president, to direct that agenda.
Now, that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop doing traditional work, like the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) is an important statute. Discrimination is bad. Violence at any house of worship or any health care facility is unacceptable, and all those statutes are going to be enforced. But we will not be weaponizing the federal government against law abiding citizens, against law abiding employers, against police departments that are trying to do the right thing and are largely doing the right thing. But if you’re enabling violent and obstructive, antisemitic protests on your campus, and I have jurisdiction, you will not be doing that.
