Trump names California Republican Harmeet Dhillon for top civil rights post

Harmeet Dhillon — one of California’s most prominent Republican Party operatives, a cultural crusader against “woke” politics and a fervent champion of President-elect Donald Trump — was named Monday by Trump to a top civil rights post in the U.S. Department of Justice. If confirmed, Dhillon would be the second woman confirmed to lead the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, following President Biden’s choice of longtime civil rights lawyer Kristen Clarke. “Harmeet Dhillon is very conservative and hardly a champion of civil rights as it is generally understood,” legal scholar and UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said by email Tuesday. “Having her in charge of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department is just astonishing, given her long history of opposition to everything that the division is charged with protecting.” In the past, Dhillon has also taken flak from conservative activists because she donated to Vice President Kamala Harris in a San Francisco district attorney race and once served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Bay Area chapter.