Another Side Of Harmeet Dhillon

SAN FRANCISCO — When Harmeet Dhillon cites the “woke ideology” she wants to put in the U.S. Justice Department’s sights, she does so from a personal familiarity perhaps unrivaled in the conservative movement.

Dhillon — a figure likely to emerge with new power from President Donald Trump’s shakeup of the department’s leadership — built her legal career and political identity in San Francisco, where she was a Republican activist vastly outnumbered by Democrats and led a legal revolt against California’s progressive policies in state and federal courts.

“The entirety of my career has been a minority, conservative viewpoint in a very liberal profession,” Dhillon told POLITICO in a recent interview. “I’m not here for a popularity contest.”

Dhillon moved to San Francisco in 2000 to pursue a job with a Silicon Valley firm during the dot-com boom. She specialized in employment and regulatory litigation, including antitrust, intellectual property and securities cases.

She loved the city, but soon grew frustrated with the unwillingness of so-called “big law” to take on the types of pro-bono causes she wanted to pursue: civil liberties, anti-abortion and religious freedom cases that appealed to her as a longtime conservative — a worldview that she said was formed by around age 14.

Dhillon had been born to a conservative Sikh family in India, emigrating to London, the Bronx and rural North Carolina throughout a peripatetic childhood. She received an Ivy League education at Dartmouth College, where she was editor of the Dartmouth Review, the conservative campus newspaper, and later graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law.

After a decade with major firms, Dhillon opened her own boutique practice, the Dhillon Law Group, in 2006, which emphasized its conservative bent and eagerness to take on cases that challenge liberal policies.

“The writing was on the wall,” Dhillon said. “Even to this day, I don’t think ‘big law’ has changed or is ever going to change. It kind of goes with the fads of what’s popular in liberal culture.”

Dhillon found herself allied with lefty civil libertarians after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when she did pro-bono work writing legal briefs on behalf of Sikh advocacy groups representing religions minorities victimized by hate crimes. Dhillon then joined the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, a regional affiliate that “didn’t ask my politics” before enlisting her to serve on its board. Dhillon recalled recently that she often found herself in the minority on policy debates. An adviser, citing the board’s confidentiality rules, declined to provide specifics, and Dhillon resigned two years into a three-year term on the board. Several of Dhillon’s contemporaries from the ACLU contacted for this article declined to be interviewed about her.

When Dhillon waded into party politics, she took heat from fellow Republicans over her ACLU role given the gap between the group’s liberal positions and Republican dogma on issues like LGBTQ+ rights and abortion. Dhillon said that she now finds the ACLU’s mission unrecognizable, adding, “It’s really just abandoned nuance … and gone just ideologically left without any principle.”

Dhillon chaired San Francisco’s Republican Party, which has not succeeded in electing a self-identified Republican to a city or county office in a quarter-century and rarely even fields serious candidates for mayor, city supervisor or in legislative districts.

Against the long odds, Dhillon twice sought office herself, seeking to represent San Francisco in the California State Assembly in 2008 and the state Senate 2012. Each time she received less than 20 percent of the vote as the Republican nominee in the general election. Friends say Dhillon’s passion was always for the courtroom rather than the ballot.

“She’s a justice warrior, she’s not a politician. Politics would be lucky to have her,” said Republican operative Heather Flick Melanson, who first met Dhillon at a networking event for San Francisco young conservatives in the city almost 20 years ago. She said they bonded over a shared love of sailing in the San Francisco Bay — and concern over the liberal excesses of the state’s ruling Democratic class.

“She’s a natural fighter,” said Melanson, who most recently served under Trump as chief of staff at the Department of Health and Human Services. “She’s not afraid.”

In 2013, while maintaining her law practice, Dhillon was elected vice chair of the California Republican Party — a perch that helped her gain national Republican attention for her fierce criticism of the state’s prominent Democrats, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“She spent decades in the most adversarial environment that you can find,” said Matt Shupe, a Republican consultant and longtime ally, who first met Dhillon when she led the city party.

“Harmeet and I had a media market all to ourselves — and it just happened to be the eighth largest media market in the country,” Shupe said. “That gave her a platform that was very unique.”

Dhillon became known nationally for sharp-elbowed appearances on cable news and social media posts flaming liberal opponents. Privately, friends say, she has a fun and dry sense of humor. A prolific knitter, she often surprises those close to her with scarves and other homespun apparel.

Dhillon was elected as one of California’s two RNC committeepersons in the spring of 2016. She had begun the election season with an affinity for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, but Dhillon said that she switched loyalties after watching him debate Trump.

“I liked his pugnaciousness,” she said of Trump. “For years, our party had been devolving into this debating society politics and everyone being polite to everyone else and losing elections, quite frankly.”

When Trump rally-goers tussled with counter-protesters shortly the California primary that June, Dhillon represented them in a lawsuit against the San Jose Police Department in which she alleged officers stood idly by as the Trump supporters were attacked. The department later settled the case.

By the time of the Republican convention in Cleveland that July, Dhillon was in the trenches for Trump. She fought on the Rules Committee to stop Cruz delegates from attempting a floor defection. Onstage at the convention, she delivered a traditional Sikh prayer — in a blue sheer headscarf worn as a sign of respect — to a convention hall reverently silent as Dhillon sang in Punjabi.

But when she delivered the same prayer at Trump’s nominating convention eight years later, online commentators labeled it as “blasphemy” and prayer to a “foreign god.” It was not the first time Dhillon was targeted for her background, once attacked as a “Taj Mahal princess” in anonymous fliers passed out at a California Republican Party convention.

“The handful of idiots who referred to me as a ‘demon worshiper’ and other things like that, they actually don’t reflect the rank-and-file of the Republican Party,” she said.

After the 2016 election, Dhillon was a contender to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, interviewing with then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. She didn’t get the appointment but still represented Trump’s interests in court. In 2019, his campaign became her client, as she challenged a Newsom-signed state law requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns before appearing on California’s primary ballot. It was a direct swing at Trump, who prevailed on constitutional grounds.

It was one of many headline-grabbing cases Dhillon took on in that period. She defended the free-speech rights of Berkeley college Republicans who invited conservative firebrands like Ann Coulter to speak and represented a Google engineer who was fired for writing a controversial memorandum on diversity.

During the pandemic, her firm and its nonprofit arm, the Center for American Liberty, also gained notoriety for fighting California’s pandemic policies, winning a U.S. Supreme Court ruling against a Newsom lockdown order that closed churches.

In 2023, Dhillon launched a longshot attempt to oust Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee, cheered on by Fox News hosts and conservative commentators including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. Dhillon argued that the party needed a chair who could shake up the status quo after losing big to Democrats for two election cycles.

Dhillon was defeated by McDaniel, but when voters returned Trump to the presidency a year later, he was ready to put her in one of the federal government’s most important legal posts.

Dhillon was among the first legal appointments of Trump’s second term, among a handful of lawyers — including now-acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who were given major Justice Department roles after serving as private lawyers for Trump, his businesses or campaign. In a December 2024 announcement, he praised Dhillon for “representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID” and “suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.”

The appointment came less than six months after Dhillon lost her husband, Sarvjit Singh Randhawa, to a long illness with cancer and Parkinson’s disease. Her father also died around the same time, just weeks before the election. Work became a distraction from grief for Dhillon, who told friends after Trump’s election that she was ready for something new — even if it meant uprooting from her home in San Francisco’s tony Russian Hill neighborhood.

“I don’t think she had time to sit and reflect on everything that was happening,” said California Republican Party Chair Corrin Rankin, a close friend.

In April 2025, Dhillon was confirmed by the Senate almost entirely on party lines, with Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski joining Democrats in opposition. (Murkowski didn’t explain the vote at the time.)

A host of civil-rights groups challenged Dhillon’s appointment and raised hackles over her stances on voting, reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights.

Among institutional critics was the ACLU, which noted Dhillon’s prior service on its Northern California board. “While we appreciate her support of civil rights and liberties during that time,” the organization wrote in a statement alerting senators to concerns about her nomination, “we have strong concerns about the evolution of her positions and her recent record.”

The Civil Rights Division, often referred to as the Justice Department’s “crown jewel,” was created in 1957 with Dwight D. Eisenhower’s signing of that year’s Civil Rights Act. The office, which currently has around 300 attorneys and staff, has traditionally focused on enforcing anti-discrimination laws against women and racial, sexual and religious minorities and protecting voting rights for people of color.

Dhillon declared a change of direction for the division, away from what she described as the “woke” ideology of previous administrations. She said that she wants to expand the division’s casework from ”the favored classes that historically have been the focus” — referring to racial or sexual minorities traditionally protected under civil-rights law — to protecting the rights of all Americans, as she put it.

“This is expanding the focus and the aperture,” Dhillon said. “This is zooming out. It is not zooming in.”

After Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson touted, during a speech at a South Side megachurch, that he hired Black women and men for a series of high-profile roles, Dhillon’s office began investigating him for racial discrimination. Saying she was “shocked and appalled” by the violence and harassment targeting Jewish students and faculty on college campuses, Dhillon has worked to clamp down on universities for alleged antisemitism.

Dhillon’s office has also terminated dozens of consent decrees for police departments and school districts accused of historic racial discrimination. Dhillon explained her objective is getting “rid of barriers to government acting efficiently,” but outside observers have described that as a perversion of the office’s mandate.

“Let me just say the obvious: we don’t really have a traditional civil rights division anymore,” said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “Civil rights have been turned on their head.”

Under Dhillon’s watch, the division has prioritized the rights of gun owners, suing the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over its long delays issuing concealed weapons permits. “The Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” she said last fall.

Civil-rights groups, including the ACLU, NAACP and Common Cause, say they can no longer count on the DOJ to open investigations into traditional discrimination cases. Rather, those groups are now regularly jousting with Dhillon and complaining about her leadership to Congress.

“The civil rights division was an ally of the most vulnerable groups in America and, now, it’s an enemy,” said Mark Rosenbaum, a longtime former leader of the ACLU in Los Angeles who now works for the nonprofit firm Public Counsel. “It’s a complete reversal. It’s the darkest days in the history of the Civil Rights Division, and there have been some dark days.”

Dhillon may soon have the opportunity to make an even bigger impact on American law. She is rumored to be under consideration for a number of Justice Department top jobs that would give her influence well beyond the civil rights portfolio she now handles. The White House and Justice Department did not respond to inquiries from POLITICO about the department’s leadership in the wake of Bondi’s removal.

Dhillon is not commenting on speculation about specific jobs, but a Friday social media post only encouraged those pushing the White House to give her a promotion.

“It is the privilege of my lifetime to serve my country at the DOJ, and I will continue to serve in whatever role the president deems most appropriate for me,” Dhillon wrote. “Stay tuned — great things ahead at the DOJ!”