It will be hard to fix what Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon broke as the head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. A conservative culture warrior who as a private attorney represented Donald Trump during the House committee’s Jan. 6 investigation, she quickly delivered on the administration’s goals to roll back civil rights protections and reversed many the hard-fought gains of Kristen Clarke, her predecessor at the Civil Rights Division.
Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and Heritage Foundation figures like Russell Vought, Brendan Carr and Kevin Roberts all connected MAGA culture war with efforts to roll back civil rights, making the leader of the DOJ’s civil rights unit of paramount importance. Dhillon delivered what MAGA wanted.
It will be hard to fix what Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon broke as the head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
Though the departure of a civil rights chief who fixated on imaginary discrimination against white men might seem like a step in the right direction, we won’t know that until we know who Trump will replace her with.
But in the meantime, we can point out just how bad Dhillon was for civil rights. Take, for example, allegations of discriminatory policing. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has historically investigated allegations of mistreatment of Black people and other marginalized groups by law enforcement officers. When police civil rights violations required federal intervention, the division led that effort and entered into consent decrees with law enforcement agencies to grant injunctive relief, often mandating additional training and accountability measures.
There were examples of such consent decrees in cities across the country before Trump became president in 2017, including the consent decree with the Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department after an officer there shot dead Black teenager Michael Brown. The Civil Rights Division under President Joe Biden’s DOJ entered into consent decrees with Louisville Metro Government and its police department after police shot dead Breonna Taylor, a young Black woman. It also entered into a consent decree with the Minneapolis Police Department after then-Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd.
Dhillon ended all those agreements. Previously in this space, we’ve discussed this administration’s disdain against the larger backdrop of the administration’s disdain for traditional interpretation of civil rights and how its abandonment of consent decrees functioned as a dog whistle to law enforcement officers, letting them know that they had wide latitude and shouldn’t be concerned about federal investigations of their actions.
Dhillon’s office has also declined to provide federal intervention with respect to allegations of police violations under the banner of states’ rights and preserving local control. Not only did she help rupture the trust between local communities and law enforcement and take away what was once a critical backstop of protection in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, but she also effectively waved off the findings of problems by previous lawyers in the division. Without new allegations of discriminatory policing, those cases can’t be reopened. The damage is nearly irreparable.
Dhillon kept herself busy at the DOJ by working to curtail the civil rights of the groups whose oppression led to the passage of civil rights statutes.
Dhillon was also behind the numerous case dismissals involving complaints of civil rights violations and discrimination against Black Americans, the dismissal of more than 50 longstanding cases and consent decrees aimed at fighting school segregation that date back to the period after Brown v. Board of Education and the unwarranted demand for election data that led to the Texas redistricting debacle in the state House.
Indeed, Dhillon kept herself busy at the DOJ by working to curtail the civil rights of the groups whose oppression led to the passage of civil rights statutes. Not only has her tenure represented a figurative whitewashing of civil rights laws, but a photo Dhillon shared to her personal Instagram account in July of more than 100 newly hired attorneys for the Civil Rights Division gives the appearance that almost every one of them is white. Dhillon told a Breitbart podcast in August that about 300 attorneys had left her division since she arrived.
Her destruction won’t be easy to remedy, if only because it is always easier to destroy than to build. Procedurally, there are hurdles that could take several years to clear in the courts if a Civil Rights Division truly committed to civil rights seeks to reestablish important precedent. There’s an obvious need to address the loopholes Dhillon exploited to wreak the havoc on civil rights, but every attempt to do so will face significant legislative hurdles, including the likelihood of automatic vetoes from the president.
Still, the scariest part of this entire discussion is who Trump attempts to position to take his place. While most civil rights advocates will not be sad to see Dhillon go, her tenure showed us just how important her position is, and why we should all be bracing ourselves for a like-minded successor.
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