Trump Culture Wars Fighter Cues Disruptive Civil Rights Agenda

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division would bring an extensive anti-"woke” litigating record that signals a harder-charging agenda for an office that’s assumed a lower profile in past Republican administrations.

Harmeet Dhillon’s staked out clear positions advancing Trump-aligned court battles on election integrity, transgender healthcare, religious liberty, and corporate diversity policies. All are areas within a DOJ civil rights purview that under President Joe Biden has been busy supporting historically underserved populations, whether through multi-million dollar redlining settlements or deals with local governments to stop pollution in communities of color.

The same relevant experience that Trump supporters say makes Dhillon preeminently qualified is engendering fear among legacy civil rights organizations that she’d be ready on Day One to transform the division. That contrasts with traditional concerns in social justice circles about GOP appointees sidelining the unit with scaled back policing and voting bias investigations.

“Previous Republican nominees to head the Civil Rights Division were either people that did not have a lot of background in civil rights or they were relatively moderate in their conservatism,” said Jon Greenbaum, a former voting section attorney at the division who recently stepped down as chief counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “This nomination suggests something different—it suggests the possibility that they will seek to weaponize the Civil Rights Division for conservative causes.”

In announcing his plans to nominate Dhillon, 55, to be assistant attorney general for civil rights on Dec. 9, Trump said she’ll be a “tireless defender of our Constitutional Rights” and praised her free speech lawsuits filed against tech companies.

Dhillon, who was a finalist for the same civil rights post in Trump’s first term, wrote on X that it was her “dream” to serve.

Antidiscrimination Statutes

At the boutique firm she founded in 2004, Dhillon’s become the go-to counsel on issues that helped animate Trump voters. This includes suing for Christians blocked from praying during Covid lockdowns or representing the University of California, Berkeley Republican club after the school canceled a speech by conservative commentator Ann Coulter.

Dhillon’s casework has steeped her in the antidiscrimination statutes over which she’d hold significant influence at DOJ, even if she’s more widely known as a Fox News surrogate and private attorney for Trump and outside counsel to his 2024 campaign.

“She’s going to be a very effective advocate in that role because she is an actual litigator,” said Matt Sarelson, the Florida managing partner of Dhillon’s San Francisco-based law firm. “She’s not coming from an academic perspective; she’s a trial attorney. These are cases that have been very near and dear to her for many years.”

Once formally nominated, Dhillon will require Senate confirmation. Civil rights leaders have started strategizing on how to fight her nomination, which will prove difficult when Republicans take over the Senate majority Jan. 3.

“We are going to encourage vigorous questioning in hearings by the Senate,” Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, said in an interview.

Contrasting Style

Trump’s first-term civil rights chief, Eric Dreiband, also drew rebukes from Democrats and civil rights activists prior to his confirmation for his work as a corporate lawyer at Jones Day.

And while Dreiband arrived with higher-level government experience than Dhillon would, he didn’t have the same ideologically-driven style, several civil rights lawyers and veterans of the division said. This likely prevented a mass exodus of career employees during his tenure, they said.

Dreiband’s nomination in June 2017 was met with “really tepid” resistance by a civil rights community that felt “this is about as good as we’re going to get,” said Greenbaum, who now runs his own consultancy. But Dhillon is “a conservative firebrand, so they pretty much have to come out strong.”

DOJ officials overseeing civil rights in past Republican administrations rejected the notion that it became a backwater division under their watch. But they agreed that Dhillon’s resume and other cultural and legal shifts in recent years indicate she’s being entrusted with what will become a prominent portfolio.

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all that she would” arrive prepared with a robust agenda, said Robert Driscoll, the deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights under President George W. Bush and now a partner at Dickinson Wright.

The greater public attention today on whether diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are themselves racist will be a natural focal point for Dhillon, said both Driscoll and first-term Trump DOJ official Jesse Panuccio.

The Supreme Court’s 2023 opinion limiting affirmative action in college admissions will also present new opportunities for a Dhillon-led Civil Rights Division to implement that ruling in higher ed, agreed Driscoll and Panuccio, a Boies Schiller partner who oversaw the division as acting associate attorney general.

Project 2025

The Civil Rights Division has long experienced policy swings when the executive branch changes parties. A heightened focus on religious freedom and fewer police accountability probes would’ve been anticipated no matter who Trump picked.

Yet Dhillon’s litigating history suggests that the division will be where the Heritage Foundation-backed Project 2025 policy blueprint becomes a reality, said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of watchdog legal organization Democracy Forward.

Project 2025 paid particular attention to the Civil Rights Division, calling for more aggressive immigration enforcement and vastly expanding its roster of political appointees.

Convincing a staff of career trial attorneys—who begin voting Thursday on whether to unionize—to buy into her vision may present challenges for Dhillon, who’s never been a government manager.

Her foes still find her formidable.

Dhillon’s “hostility to diversity and voting rights” is consistent with Republican predecessors at the division, said Paul Butler, a Georgetown University law professor specializing in civil rights. “What makes Dhillon more dangerous is her considerable legal experience opposing racial and social justice initiatives.”