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

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

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.

People have been arrested, prosecuted, and sent to jail for years for praying outside abortion clinics. There were very few prosecutions of actual violence against pregnancy crisis centers. How is the Trump administration transforming the DOJ's civil rights priorities? Joining us today for a deep dive is Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division. Their jurisdiction includes a wide range of constitutional issues, from religious freedom to Title IX protections for women's sports to race-based discrimination. 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 versus Massachusetts. Do not allow states to do whatever they want to their citizens in the name of public health. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Harmeet Dhillon, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Thanks for having me on. There's been apparently a lot of people leaving your division, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. What is the current status of that? And why do you think that's happening?

Well, when we came in with a new government, of course, there are 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, I think, 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. And so what I did when I came in after being confirmed about just about a month ago,

So what I did when I came in after being confirmed about just about a month ago, a little over a month ago is as I came in my first week, my second week in getting organized, I decided it would be a good opportunity to reset the expectations of all the people in the Civil Rights Division. And I will add that there has 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. And so I figured 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. So making sure everyone's on the same page, I thought what I should do is reestablish what our priorities are. So I sent memos to each of the 11 sections under the Civil Rights Division that I manage, and they're I think fully staffed. It's about 600 people with about 400 plus attorneys. Setting out the statutory framework. So each of the sections deals with some federal statutes and then maybe also a couple of constitutional issues like the First Amendment and things like that. So for example, we have

Voting Rights Act under voting. We have Help America Vote Act, 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. So all of these deal with different areas. And under each of those statutory bases that governs the section, I explain what the priorities were going to be of this administration. And what everyone needs to understand is, yes, there are laws, and then there are emphases within those laws. I don't have enough people.

If I had 10 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. So I explained to the lawyers and the other staff in the sections what the priorities were going to be. And they were derived from the president's executive orders, as well as priorities in the Department of Justice

that the attorney general, Pam Bondi, and deputy attorney general have mentioned. And so that actually triggered quite a few people in the department who have spent some of their careers doing 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 in 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. And so 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. And so apparently, people didn't like that. So 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. So they're still on the books, but they're no longer working at the DOJ. That was really hundreds of people. Well, so yeah, so where are we at? I think the Washington Post reported towards the end of April that it was half. Is that where things are at now? It's about half of the overall staff, including attorneys, and close to half of the attorneys. Okay. Maybe, just very briefly, lay out for me what those priorities are then.

Well, I cited the President's executive orders. The laws that protect the opportunity of women, young women, to have opportunity in sports are being violated by men being in those sports. And so I think everyone should have opportunities. That was the purpose of Title IX, is to give women opportunities that weren't getting them. And so 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, Students for Fair Admission, relating to Harvard and UNC. So it's been explicitly laid out by our top court that you can't use race and 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'm very passionate about it as a lawyer my entire career.

And so focusing on, there's a federal law called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act that protects the rights of houses of worship and of prisoners to not be discriminated against in their religious worship. And so we're bringing zoning cases under that's called RLUPA. 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. So we've changed our focus to people who are voting illegally and we have bloated voting rolls all over the country and so there are federal statutes that require states to keep their voting rolls updated. They're not doing that for the most part, red states and blue states. So 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. And many citizens don't feel confident anymore. So these are some of the issues that we're focusing on. There's so many others. There's one thing I saw

you mentioned, and you have a number of new things that you've publicized that you've become interested in, and I want to get you to kind of tell me what those are, but one just struck me in particular, which was a law that was passed in Washington that to compel pre-Catholic priests to break their seal of confession, if I understand it correctly. Well, I think 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. And of course we take that very seriously as well, and our DOJ has been very aggressive in pursuing criminal charges against sex trafficking, trend dog, MS-13 and domestically as well. But the First Amendment bars the

government from interfering with establishing a state religion of course but also interfering with people's reasonable religious practices that and so I I think that that's a head-on clash between the legitimate interest of Washington State and pursuing criminal predators versus the absolute privacy and seal of the confessional in the Catholic Church and there's similar religious doctrines and other faiths but it's unique to the Catholic Church that that's really part of the sacrament. And so we're trying to understand and investigate what's going on there. I believe that law may well run afoul of

the First Amendment, and 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, in fact, a case that I litigated called Tandon v. Newsom that 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. And so is that law going to meet the highest level of scrutiny? I think that's gonna be the question that we're examining carefully.

Priests have told me and reached out to me about this law that they go to jail before they would break their vows. Of course, most of us, I would go to jail too before I would break my fundamental religious beliefs. And so we don't want the state to put people in that position. And so we're looking at that carefully. And then, so there's something else about race being a consideration in plea deals, if I recall correctly now. Maybe that was something else you were commenting on. So this is also, this is an interesting case, Jan, of a government worker saying the quiet part out loud, okay? And what I mean by that is, I believe that over the last many years we've had very, very sort of aggressive new prosecutors get elected into office with the promise of

criminal justice reform, anti-police, and using their positions to right prior wrongs in our country related to race. Now I think we can all acknowledge that you know 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. And so the idea that what this Hennepin County, Minnesota prosecutor Mary Moriarty announced as the official policy of her department, she cashed it in some wishy-washy terms, but effectively the policy is it is appropriate for prosecutors to consider race appropriate for prosecutors to consider race in plea deals. And so the race of the offender in the plea deals. And again, United States Constitution bars that.

Equal Protection Clause bars that, 13th Amendment. And 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. And so I think it's shocking that someone would get a different plea offer who committed a crime, same crime, based on their race. What does that say to the victim? And what does that say to the public?

We're gonna 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 scrutiny, that kind of analysis. And so 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 on crime plea agreements that appear to be racially motivated. And what I've also heard is that this sub rosa policy is happening in other jurisdictions as well. So in my opinion, this is deeply troubling and we will be investigating jurisdictions that are using race in sentencing. Because look, there has been 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. So we are going to look into that. I'm thinking back to your confirmation hearings. And I realized, learned during that, that you're no stranger to this.

Like your husband, or then husband, was actually shot by a racist, basically. Yes, that did happen to me. I was newlywed in the early 90s in New York City. And my then husband was a medical resident, and 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 was cooking dinner. I had to turn off the stove and rush to the emergency room and the priest, Catholic priest who was on duty there said you need to get down here because he may not make it. So that was get down there and I learned that he was shot by a racist who took issue with his turban and shot him and then New York gave him a slap on the wrist for committing that crime, that crime that involved slurs about my husband's religion. It was quite shocking to me. And

you know, I then realized, okay, this is New York. 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. In the realm of race, you've had some high profile meetings, for example, with Jewish leaders talking about the issue of antisemitism specifically. I see a lot of people thinking about this and even some very well-meaning people, which seem to be well-meaning in many areas, not understanding why one would want to focus on antisemitism in particular at this time. And so my thought is, why don't I give you an opportunity to talk about that? Yes, you're right. There are many people who are questioning

why this administration is focusing on this issue of anti-Semitism, 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 on campuses. And there is a history of discrimination against Jews in our lifetimes, many of our lifetimes. In the modern era, not even, you know, 100 years ago, horrific crimes occurred and these crimes are being perpetuated in many ways.

And so some of the scars of the past are being brought up. Some of the imagery of the Holocaust is being used against today's 19 and 20 year old Jewish units. And so 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 being able to attend 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. And 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. Race is also happening, racial discrimination is also happening in admissions on these campuses. I think that's a distinct issue. They happen to be happening at the same campuses for the most part, so sometimes that gets conflated.

But the anti-Semitism issue is a distinct one. And my alma mater of University of Virginia So sometimes that gets conflated, but the anti-Semitism issue is a distinct one. And my alma mater of University of Virginia had a horrific incident in the last semester. And the students who perpetuated some horrific slurs against a Jewish, highly distinguished Jewish scholar at that UVA, they're on campus. They didn't get punished much. And the student is coming back to campus and wants to graduate, walk with his colleagues, and we're worried about that student's safety.

And 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, Dartmouth College, I met with that president of Dartmouth College last week in my office, Sean Belluck. 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 whether they're 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 education, that's illegal.

And so we're glad to highlight and see that some campuses are getting it right. You know, speaking of that, there's this incident at a Barstool Sports Bar that's getting mileage this morning. I'm seeing a lot of that. So that is that speech? Is that action? Well, you know, I don't know all the details of that. I was busy with the work stuff this weekend. But, you know, I don't know all the details of that. I was busy with the work stuff this weekend, but you know, you don't have unlimited rights of

speech in a business. You have unlimited rights of speech in limited public areas. So a business, you know, your workplace is not a place where you can bring your slogans that harass and intimidate other people. And so if someone is bringing anti-Semitic 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. So 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. Let me just build on that a little further because there's been a lot of media over the last few weeks about basically taking away someone's green card. There's discussion, 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? That's not really our bailiwick. The small piece of immigration that the Civil Rights

Division covers, we have an immigration section that mainly deals with the workplace. And so, you know, it is illegal under certain circumstances to prefer non-citizens or, you know, people who don't have a certain legal status over people who do in the workplace. We have that little slice. So most of what you're talking about has to do with ICE and Homeland Security and so forth.

And so that issue is going to be worked out through the courts. But as a former green card holder, my parents came here and 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, you know, follow certain laws and not as well as anti-American viewpoints. That's all spelled out in your green card application. So, shouldn't be anybody's, should, nobody should be surprised to know that you don't get carte blanche as a

green card holder to do whatever you want. So, in this, again, General Rahm, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill ordering her attorney general to enforce federal immigration laws. Your comment was, oh, really? Yeah, look, I mean, this is something that my home state of California, my former home state of California, also did. They made some elaborate laws that had to do with where and when ICE could come and arrest people. 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 try to help them get away,

aiding and abetting someone being a fugitive. And so this is a fraud area policy right now. And, you know, there's federalism, there's a division between state and federal, know there there's federalism there's a division between state and federal and then there's obstruction so I'm sure that there are some very smart people in our Department of Justice and our law enforcement agencies and policymakers are going to be looking at that. I'm interested in the issue because judges and even governors have tried to take

the position that their states and people have passed laws that states are sanctuary states where people who have broken the law to come into our country can do whatever they want, live by property, get driver's licenses. California is like that. Many other states are like that. So eventually the Supreme Court is going to have to rule on these issues. And frankly, eventually, Congress may have to tighten up some of our laws. So you probably had a chance to look at this recent

Harvard report on anti-Semitism. I just wanted to get your takeaways. 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, 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, frankly, a lot of college campuses.

I mentioned UVA and others. But it struck me as a very sincere report in a lot of ways. Okay. Now, what you don't know is it's one of two reports. There's also a report that sort of takes the same view of how bad it was for Middle Eastern students on the campus. So you got 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, you know, kind of what aboutism of putting out two reports at the same time. I'll just leave it at that. But, you know, 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. And then there's the students who just like mom and dad scraped and saved

and they want to get, they want their kid to get a good education. So 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. And so you are seeing UNC got sued in Students for Fair Admission. I met with the chancellor at UNC. A chancellor when some Hamas-infas 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 there are campuses that are

doing the right thing. They got the message loud and clear we we have to protect all of our students not just the patsies here while violence occurs and open warfare in the streets. So my UC system of University of California among the worst offenders, some of the things you see happening at UCLA, 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. No student, whatever their background, Middle Eastern, Jewish, Christian, whatever, they're going there for an education. That's the job one. And it's the job of the campus administrators and the police.

In an urban environment like New York City or what have you, they've got 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 know, if I were the boss of the university, I'm not, of course, and I don't want that job.

It's a hard job. So you're gonna see this United States Department of Justice and this administration put a lot of focus on making it safe to be a student again. So, you know, over the last five years, one of the reasons why I kind of kept abreast of you and your work with your law firm is you were challenging all sorts of medical mandates. There's a lot of people were dismissed from government, from private, from military, I mean, all sorts of places over time. Does how does the Civil Rights Division fit into

these past scenarios? And are they are they different from each other? So this is also a very complicated area, believe it or not. Guidance of our Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is sort of 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 EEOC acting commissioner about that. I think that's wrong and I think 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 kind of a big barrier I think I should have control over that and yet that's the policy. So now that policy runs up against another employment policy, which is employers are required to make accommodations of employees' good faith religious beliefs.

So that's where you've seen a disconnect. Systematically, both government employers and private employers systematically ran rough shot 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 and my non-profit also helped some people. There's 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 is the North Carolina Symphony, where's the cellist gonna go? They have limited job opportunities and because of their faiths, I think two were Buddhist and one was another faith, they were fired and they lost their jobs because of that because their faith said they shouldn't be required to take this drug to keep their jobs. So 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. I'm probably aware there's a kind of 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, I suppose. But where does the state law end? And where does the federal line when it comes to these

questions? Yeah, so 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 versus Massachusetts, that, yeah, the state, which has so-called police power over health issues like epidemics and, you know, gosh, back then they were dealing with smallpox, tuberculosis. People were dying in large numbers because it predated modern, 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 to not get 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. And so that book is, that law is still on the books in the United States. Even though in the intervening century, 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 because San Francisco had shut down. So I was at my weekend home with my husband. 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.

And I said, Judge, this county is arresting people to drive into a parking lot and hear their pastor in a parking lot. So there's clearly no health issue. And that's unconstitutional. And the judge said, well, Ms. Stillen, I'm struggling with the type of analysis I should be using here. I said, well, it should be strict scrutiny because it's an infringement on religious liberty.

He said, no, I'm struggling between whether it should be rational basis review or deferential review. 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 religion 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, where it comes to religion,

yes, strict scrutiny must apply. And that was a landmark decision, Tandon versus 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 as 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 gonna experience generational retardation of educational opportunity and performance at work because of the wrong-headed 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 versus 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. You're saying you want Congress to basically pass a law that supersedes. Well, 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. And it stems directly from that police power that the courts have said, the Supreme Court has said, the states have. So yeah, it is the states. And where states stand up like Idaho, good for them, Idaho was pretty bad, I will tell you, Idaho and Utah. You think, oh, red states, a lot of people there are going to... No, those two states, the governors are among the worst. So it was not a blue or red issue. I saw shocking authoritarianism from governors of every political background during COVID. I sued many of them.

Well, and what's very interesting in a lot of these scenarios, it's, you know, with the best intentions, I say that in quotes. We're doing it for your own good. Right. A number of people I've spoken with have argued that this area, civil rights, is where the most of the weaponization of government happened. And obviously this is a top priority of the Department of Justice. Attorney General has repeatedly talked about that.

Is that your view? 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 and women's sports to men 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. I've 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's a minority has now changed in many ways. And so the majority can be a mob saying, you know, you have to believe x, y, and z, and diversity, equity, inclusion. And 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 of I'm white, or I'm a male, or I'm Asian Asian and people from my background succeed, why should I be punished for that? So that's kind of, we're trying to take a race blind and, you know, really just an objective view of the civil rights law.

So one of the interesting things that we found when he came into the office, it was like, you know, in, in, in, in classical mythology, the Aegean stables, there was a lot of stuff in there that needed to be cleaned out. And we found consent decrees that the Justice Department had negotiated with school districts or police departments that had engaged in discrimination decades ago. That was still on the books. That was 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. Whatever happened, some bad incident that happened admittedly was over. Everyone who did it had retired. Someone's still making money off of that. We are one by one uncovering these little hidden grenades in the building and diffusing 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. For the benefit of the audience, what is that consent decree? What does that mean exactly? Consent decree is basically a court

governed settlement agreement that has ongoing reporting obligations. And 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. So they have to hire some poor school district that did something wrong 50 years ago, has to pay some law firm out of instead of paying for books or education or after school programs. It's ridiculous. So 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's 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 were reviewing, my order was 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 their 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. How would you respond to someone, and I've seen this kind of lobbed, let's say, that the new DOJ is just weaponization going in a different direction. 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.

And 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. And 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. And 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 and 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's 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 and my staff has to say Harmeet there's only so many resources you got and we can't work as hard as you want us to do it on all these things. So we're trying to get more people in who want to do our work. Of course there's a current hiring freeze in the government right now. There's a budget. OMB has got some discipline they're imposing. I split 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 got the same issue, that 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 nonsense lawsuits. All of these different agendas are really important and we need great people to do it. So I've got a lot of people waiting in line who want to join this mandate, but it's a very exciting time in America. So equal opportunity enforcement, basically, that's what you're saying. Gosh, it should be equal.

Yeah, I think it should be equal. And I don't think it's... And the United States Supreme Court has told us very recently in Students for Fair Admissions, the Harvard and UNC case, it's not legal to discriminate against Asians in that case for you for Harvard and whites. They didn't, 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. And we are in every day I'm dealing with numerous campus

issues where, you know, I think it's no secret that the Department of Justice has got its eye on the places in our country where that DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion has resulted in racial discrimination and discrimination of 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 people as well on these policy mandates. So we are investigating, we are hearing, we are listening, and then we're taking action. Well, and I kind of see how this is of particular importance to you in a way because you're from Punjab, as you said, I think you're Sikh, right? I'm Sikh. And you were able to overcome whatever discrimination there may have been around such things in

this country and this country offered, here you are, Assistant Attorney General of the United States for Civil Rights. I'm not sure that's quite possible in most countries in the world. It's not possible in most countries in the world. This is the freest and most open country in the world. People are willing to give you a chance. They're friendly and and they believe in justice and so it's not perfect. I get slurs every day you know 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 in 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. I mean, 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 Annabon County, Minnesota, thinks it's OK 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. When you were talking about that earlier, I was thinking about it. I mean, it can also cut both ways.

It could say, well, if you're a certain identity, we could make it harder on you too, right? Not just it. And it just, it doesn't really make sense. I mean, I wish I had, I've been a hardworking person my entire career. It's like 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. So, 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. You said it's offensive. I mean, it's illegal. It's offensive at the basic human level, but it's illegal. You know, interesting case at the Supreme Court recently about, and it was a broad swath of parents of different religions who object to graphic and I think aggressive sexual propaganda being foisted on their children without their consent. This issue of parental consent is an undermentioned and considered fundamental civil right. I call it a natural right, a human right. It even 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 education of children. And yet, 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 actively this being 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. law which says that only parents have the right to make these health decisions

and these sort of fundamental identity decisions for their children. And 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. Well that's not right. And 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.

And we're really taking a strong line on that. You know, another issue that you've been looking at is, issue that you've been looking at is basically let's say people that are seeking to stop women who are getting abortions at abortion clinics from doing so in different ways. Where's the line in terms of what sort of activity is reasonable? So this is an interesting statute. It does cover abortion clinics, but it covers all clinics where people go to get reproductive advice, which includes pregnancy crisis centers, okay? So 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 prevents violent attacks on houses of worship in the country. There are other laws that do as well, but it's kind of a focus of the FACE Act. That's the law you're talking about.

Under recent administrations, the huge emphasis has been on punishing nonviolent 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 doesn't meet the definitions in the statute. You know, 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.

And the Department of Justice has prosecuted a very small handful of those. The vast reponderance of the prosecutions have been against people of faith, pro-life activists, praying and counseling outside these centers. And so I think that there is a place under this FACE Act for prosecuting anybody who fire bombs a healthcare facility or the home of a doctor. That's what the statute was originally intended for, and that's wrong. So, there's a- It's wrong that- It's wrong to-

That someone would do that, obviously. It's wrong to kill a doctor. Right. It's wrong to kill a healthcare worker. It's wrong to be a terrorist. Being a terrorist is wrong, okay, 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. And, frankly, I would argue again if members of Congress asked 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 not be prosecuted under the FACE Act, never again.

And what about, you know, talking to people a lot as they're trying to go to one of these facilities or, you know, maybe obstructing their path to those places. I mean, the point is there's different gradations here. There's different gradations and each case is unique. I wouldn't want to prejudge how cases occur. But you know, what I've said to people who asked me and I've, you know, there's been a topic of conversation on the anti-Semitism issue as well.

What's the difference between like, there's a frequent misnomer in the First Amendment jurisprudence and it's like the First Amendment lawyers joke the most dumb thing we hear is you know 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 a 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. So what I will tell you 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. 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. Right. Well, I have multiple questions. How does this fit into the Civil Rights Division, what you're doing now? Well, 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 four women in three movements in California, 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, 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. Okay, so they think they're in the wrong body. Thousands of children are sold the lie that they're born in the wrong body and that's a lie. I don't think that's true. And then they're given drugs with the gating item is one meeting with a guidance counselor at a school that doesn't have any medical training at all, or some psychologist or some therapist. Everything is affirm, defer, and defer. No one pushes back on these kids. It's a fad, and I think that we're going to look back on this period of time as effectively the modern lobotomy. This favored practice now that we find to be abhorrent, barbaric and inhumane is now 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, again this is my opinion as a lawyer, it is impossible for a child to give consent, informed consent to these barbaric medical procedures. So now what's interesting is 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 a, in my opinion, barbaric practice that occurs in certain countries, not the United States, but immigrants from those countries come here and they bring these practices, which is mutilating 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. It doesn't usually, they don't usually, these children don't usually have the bottom surgery until after they turn, you know, 18 for various reasons. There's various reasons I won't bore you with today. So there's probably not a lot of cases of female genital mutilation that's occurring under the age of 18, but if they're occurring in this country, it's a crime.

And 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? And by the way, there's a high degree of regret amongst 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 now doesn't work. They're not doing it for ideological religious reasons. It just doesn't work. These kids become adults with long standing regret, suicide, and irreversible damage to their bodies. So 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 make money, plastic

surgery, what have you, Everybody check the box saying this gender affirming care on this child is a medical necessity. Fast-tracked to the front of the line. Money-making revenue center for strapped medical professionals, abhorrent and crazy in some ways. And so a lot of this falls under the purview of state law. Some states have banned these practices. One of my clients, former clients Chloe Cole, has gone and testified in front of a number of legislatures. People are talking about extending the statute to limitation now. So this is mostly a state law. Where there's a federal law or federal avenue, we're beginning to send

some, beginning to do some law enforcement. I won't tip our hand as to what we're doing, but people who are getting the letters, they know what we're investigating and there'll be more to say about that in the future. Chloe's been on the show along with, I don't think other of your clients. Luca Hine, Clementine Breen, Leila Jane. But Chloe is among the most active young people in the United States. She saved a lot of lives by telling her story

and convinced some states, legislatures, to advance some of these practices and then testified in cases where the ACLU or other organizations try to overturn those bands. You know, HHS has just, I think, you know, within the last couple of days come out with a report. Some people are touting a sort of a CAS report for America, right, about gender-affirming care. I don't know if you've had a chance to look at that. I haven't dug into it. I mean, I've been studying. I've read thousands of pages of these materials over the years.

It probably wouldn't surprise me what's in there. I'm just wondering if that will be, if this official HHS document will somehow help in your work at the federal level. It may. I think more importantly, we need to be equipping doctors and lawyers all over the country. Lawyers, unfortunately, and 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 and it happened in the scale of thousands in the United States. It's a fact. And it happened in 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. So I have a confession to make.

I was one of these people that generally had a broad negative view of lawyers. I didn't know I did. I just kind of realized it at one point. Everyone does. It's OK, Jan. It's OK. It's a safe space.

You can admit that. But I've actually changed my mind quite a bit over the last several years, watching some lawyers doing some heroic work, frankly. So what is it that made you decide to take this route? Because it hasn't been a conventional route. It's an accident of fate, you might say, or God's design, I would believe now.

I come from a medical family. Both my grandfathers were doctors. One was a four-star general in the Indian Air Force. And dad was a doctor. So I grew up 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, you know, shady used car salesman. Really discredited and worse than that is politician. So 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 long time member of the Republican National Committee. Everyone for office like they had to get over that. It had 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 journalist, young journalist. I went to Dartmouth at 16, fell in with that journalist Dartmouth Review crowd and I experienced First Amendment violations. Now it wasn't

really the First Amendment in the sense that it was a private institution but you know took federal funding so we made some First Amendment arguments in court but at the end of the day it was a contract basis. We had a student handbook that said the reasons that you could get kicked out of school. Well, three of my colleagues are 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. And that was a watershed event in my life that some kids could sue their school. This venerated 250 year old Ivy League institution, we know better, billions of dollars. 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. And you go to law school, and you have all these lofty intentions, and 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. So the first decade of my career was doing that, chafing it

the bit, doing a lot of public interest work on the side, pro bono. And then 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 represent the person who without that lawyer doesn't have a chance against the oppressive machinery of the state, the Kafkaesque corporate bureaucracy that we have all experienced in jobs in our lives. So I love what I do every day. That's how it happened. That's a good story.

So what can we expect next from the DOJ Civil Rights Division? I kind of jokingly, at the beginning of the day a lawyer will burst into my office and I'm like, 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 issues. How bad is it?

Find out more. Get the police department or the victim or the member of Congress or whoever brought it to my tent. Get them 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 the big things that we've been working on so far have been some of these campus issues, religious land use issues, 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 and then investigate and make a decision. People need to

understand the Civil Rights Division is, 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, when are you going to fix the voting problems and machines in my state?

Well, guess what? You got a state legislature. You 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.

And about this equal opportunity enforcement, is this the end of selective justice, I guess you could be called? Well, 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 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 like crazy things, let's like slow that down. And sit on our hands.

We haven't been plaintiffs' lawyers. We haven't been going out there aggressively and having our own affirmative civil rights agenda. Because there was no such thing as like a bunch of civil rights lawyers with my orientation that I described here in this interview, when I came out of law school. Like 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 like make it make it up myself. And now 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's a lot more lawyers who want to do that. So that's why I'm not gonna have a problem staffing up when we get that opportunity here at DOJ. We are not going

to sit back and just like 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 won. So it's exciting. It hasn't been done before and we have partners all over the US government. Every day I have meetings with or calls with EEOC, Health and Human Services, Department of Education, the White House, people other people in the Department of Justice. We run into each other's offices, hey 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. Well, Harmeet Dhillon, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you all for joining Harmeet Dhillon and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.