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.
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Charles F. Coleman Jr.
Charles F. Coleman Jr. is a civil rights attorney and a former Brooklyn, New York, prosecutor. He is an MS NOW legal analyst and the author of the book “Rethinking Police: Cops, Color, and an American Crisis” to be published in Spring 2027 by Broadleaf Books. Follow him on X @CFColemanJr.
