President-elect Donald Trump is setting the world to rights, especially with his pick to lead the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon.
In a grotesque abuse of power, the Biden administration used the division that aims to uphold civil rights as a cudgel to silence Americans who protest the killing of unborn children. The department also followed Biden in twisting federal law to push gender ideology.
Dhillon’s record as a civil rights lawyer suggests she’s exactly the right person to right the ship at DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
Biden-Era Abuses
The Department of Justice has multiple divisions, with assistant attorneys general at their helms. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke leads up the Civil Rights Division under President Joe Biden, and she has weaponized the division to target pro-lifers.
In one case, the Civil Rights Division sent a SWAT team to the home of a Catholic father with seven children at 7 a.m. on charges that he had assaulted an abortion center worker. Not only had local authorities declined to charge Mark Houck for the brief altercation, but a federal jury ultimately acquitted him. He’s now suing for malicious prosecution.
While the DOJ clearly states that the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act protects access to both abortion centers and to pro-life pregnancy resource centers, the Civil Rights Division charged 26 pro-lifers with FACE Act violations in 2022. By contrast, the DOJ charged only four people with FACE Act violations in 2021 and even fewer in the years before that. Following the leak of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion overturning the abortion precedent Roe v. Wade, vandals have attacked at least 95 pro-life pregnancy centers and 303 Catholic churches.
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who held Clarke’s job during the Obama administration, said in December 2022 that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe increased “the urgency” of the DOJ’s work, including the “enforcement of the FACE Act, to ensure continued lawful access to reproductive services.”
A former DOJ official told The Daily Signal that the department appears to be “using the FACE Act to intimidate the pro-life population of the country.”
Yet the Civil Rights Division has also taken up the cause of transgender orthodoxy. Last March, the division published a “Fiscal Year 2024 Performance Budget,” justifying its work for Congress to subsidize.
In that document, the department followed Biden’s twisting of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020). In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that “discrimination on the basis of sex” in employment law prevented employers from firing or refusing to hire people based on claimed gender identity, as well as sexual orientation. While Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority in Bostock, explicitly stated that the ruling only applied to employment law, Biden issued an executive order applying to it all federal civil rights law.
“As a result, in addition to our Title VII [employment law] cases involving sexual assault and misconduct, we are pursuing cases based on gender identity and sexual orientation across all of our statutes that prohibit sex discrimination,” the department noted.
The department highlighted “developments” that it claimed “reflect the increased visibility and urgency of issues related to gender-based violence and discrimination.” In that list, it claimed that “nearly 240 anti-LGBTQ bills have been filed in state legislatures in 2022 alone, most of them targeting people for their gender identity.”
That suggests that the Civil Rights Division was gearing up to file lawsuits against states that pass laws aimed at protecting kids from experimental transgender medical interventions or preventing biological males from accessing women’s private spaces.
Kristen Clarke
Clarke served as president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a left-wing activist group. She also worked for five years at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a leftist group that links abortion to “racial justice.” Both groups have frequently accessed the Biden White House and received large cash infusions from the Left’s dark money network, as I reveal in my forthcoming book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”
This bureaucrat’s social media history suggests a bias against pro-lifers and Christians. She cited the far-left smear factory the Southern Poverty Law Center in condemning Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit pro-life and religious freedom law firm, as a “hate group.”
She said that those protesting Dr. Anthony Fauci, the controversial COVID-19 czar and now-retired head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, should be “publicly identified and named, barred from treatment at any public hospital if/when they fall ill and denied coverage under their insurance.”
As my former colleague Mary Margaret Olohan exclusively reported for The Daily Signal, Clarke had been arrested for attacking her then-husband, Reginald Avery, with a knife, deeply slicing one of his fingers to the bone in 2006. The pair finalized their divorce in 2009. Clarke had the arrest expunged from her record, and during her Senate confirmation, she denied ever having been arrested or having been accused of committing a violent crime. Clarke admitted to her failure to disclose that arrest, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, called for her to resign.
Harmeet Dhillon’s Record
Dhillon, by contrast, has been a fearless advocate, not just for pro-lifers, but for the civil liberties of many who stand against the woke orthodoxies of the day.
While the Civil Rights Division prosecuted pro-lifers, Dhillon has represented pro-life journalist David Daleiden, who exposed Planned Parenthood staff who sold aborted-baby body parts. Then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris launched an investigation into Daleiden that later led to criminal charges from her successor, Xavier Becerra (who now serves as Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services). Planned Parenthood also sued him, and Daleiden responded with lawsuits of his own.
Dhillon also represented former Google senior software engineer James Damore, who sued Google after it terminated him following his exposure of the Big Tech company’s anti-conservative bias. She sued Rose City Antifa on behalf of journalist Andy Ngo, after Ngo suffered injuries in an assault in Portland, Oregon.
Dhillon also represented Americans who lost their freedoms during the COVID-19 pandemic. She filed more than a dozen lawsuits against pandemic orders in California, representing pastors, businesses, and citizens.
She testified before a House committee about the COVID-era abuses in April.
“At any given time today, a state or federal government could declare an emergency—or fabricate some other unfounded excuse—and suspend our fundamental rights once again,” she warned. “Most courts will not stop them, as we have unfortunately seen. It is imperative that Congress intervene so history cannot and will not repeat itself.”
“One of the most egregious violations of our First Amendment freedoms was the treatment of religious Americans as second-class citizens, as vectors of disease,” Dhillon warned. “From the very beginning of the pandemic, governors across the country discriminately labeled houses of worship, and by extension the First Amendment, as ‘non-essential,’ while at the same time leaving their secular counterparts open for business. In my state, California, marijuana, liquor, and big-box retailers were deemed essential, but God was banned.”
What a breath of fresh air to move from a person who said COVID-19 dissenters should be barred from hospitals to someone who defended the civil rights government trampled on during the pandemic.
Dhillon has also championed the cause of detransitioners—men and women who identified as transgender, underwent medical experiments to alter their bodies, and then rejected their transgender identities, lamenting the damage done to their bodies. Detransitioners are often left out in the cold, as transgender people receive praise and recognition in public and LGBTQ activist groups often demonize or ignore those who are victimized by gender ideology.
Dhillon started the process of suing Kaiser Permanente on behalf of detransitioner Chloe Cole, a woman who suffers from experimental hormone “treatments” and surgery she had between the ages of 13 and 17.
“The medical system shouldn’t dictate the future of young children’s lives,” Dhillon said in announcing legal action. “Through this legal action, the ‘professionals’ involved will be held accountable for their despicable plot to mutilate children and financially benefit from it.”
Dhillon, who was born in Chandigarh, India, to a Punjabi Sikh family, delivered a Sikh prayer at the Republican National Convention earlier this year. While some conservatives criticized her for that, Sikhs often understand religious freedom issues because Sikh soldiers have had to fight for the right to wear turbans in the U.S. military.
Dhillon has proven herself a warrior for free speech, religious freedom, and sanity in the face of radical abortion and transgender movements.
President-elect Trump said it well:
Throughout her career, Harmeet has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.
Dhillon will represent a major upgrade from Clarke. Perhaps more importantly, she will actually uphold civil rights at the Civil Rights Division. Imagine that.
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
