Harmeet Dhillon’s Civil-Rights Revolution Comes With Tea and Roses

The Trump ally is engineering a Justice Department U-turn to advance the president’s agenda.

Harmeet Dhillon at her Senate confirmation hearing in February.

WASHINGTON—One night in April, Harmeet Dhillon was making spiced Indian tea she said she needed to power through her 12-hour days running the Justice Department’s civil-rights division.

Harmeet Dhillon’s Civil-Rights Revolution Comes With Tea and Roses

“Continuity and fragrance in a sea of change,” she wrote on X, sharing her masala cha recipe and a video clip.

The next day, Dhillon rattled division supervisors with an email telling them she had overhauled their mission in service to President Trump.

In her first weeks on the job, Dhillon has redeployed the division from its traditional civil-rights priorities to one advancing a MAGA agenda. So far that has meant fighting diversity initiatives, transgender rights and “wokeness,” while advocating for the rights of gun owners and religious groups.

In the past week alone, the Trump administration launched an investigation into whether Chicago engaged in racial discrimination by hiring Black employees for top jobs; announced it would use an antifraud law to pressure universities to end diversity and inclusion programs; pulled back from federal oversight of local law enforcement; and sued an Idaho town of 925 people for refusing to allow a small Christian church to operate in a commercial zone.

“In prior Republican administrations, little attempt was made to actually harness the civil-rights division for affirmative policy change,” Dhillon said last week. “We are taking the mandate of the voters and we’re implementing that on our policy priorities.”

Harmeet Dhillon giving a benediction at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

The civil-rights division is always subject to significant shifts in agenda with each change in administration, but Dhillon has gone further by enlisting it in a plethora of conservative causes that have never been part of its portfolio. At least 250 lawyers—well over half of the division—have left, according to current and former officials.

“What we’re seeing now is a complete gutting of all the traditional work of the civil-rights division and then a rump of the civil-rights division being used almost exclusively to pursue right-wing Trumpist agenda items,” said Samuel Bagenstos, a former senior civil-rights official in the Obama Justice Department.

Dhillon, 55, has long been among Trump’s staunchest legal allies. She led a group of conservative lawyers in trying to help Trump challenge his 2020 election loss. The namesake law firm she founded in 2006 has been involved in many Trump-related legal battles, including restoring him to Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot and successfully defending him in a defamation case brought by adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.

One of Dhillon’s first moves at the Justice Department was to rewrite the division’s mission of protecting minorities from discrimination to align instead with Trump’s executive orders. She urged investigations on issues including transgender athletes in women’s sports, affirmative action in education and alleged voter fraud by unauthorized immigrants.

“The zealous and faithful pursuit of this section’s mission requires dedication of the section’s resources, actions, attention, and energy to the priorities and objectives of the President,” Dhillon wrote.

She has said she inherited an office full of liberal activists and that lawyers shouldn’t work at the Justice Department if they can’t get behind the administration’s agenda. “Personnel is policy,” Dhillon posted on X.

She has developed an influencer-level presence on the platform, offering the 1.2 million followers of her personal account a constant stream of posts that mix conservative views with tips about gardening, knitting and crab ravioli. Shortly after the personnel post she shared a picture of some blooming pink roses that she said were “legacy flowers in my new home.” A number of her followers shared their own bloom pictures in return.

In her pre-Trump days, Dhillon took her stress-relief knitting hobby and expanded it into her own textile business, creating knit products with wool sourced from sheep on a ranch where she and her husband, Sarvjit Randhawa, owned a home.

“Ten years ago I would have called this touchy-feely hippie nonsense. But it’s a conservative value to not rely on foreign labor and materials,” Dhillon once told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Randhawa died last year, and she frequently posts about navigating life in Washington without him.

Dhillon sees leading the civil-rights division as a chance to make progress on causes she has long championed.

Born in northern India, Dhillon grew up in North Carolina, where her conservative parents started a Sikh temple and raised money for Republican politicians, including then-Sen. Jesse Helms.

She has had personal experiences with hate crime and discrimination. A former husband, a Sikh doctor, was shot and wounded in 1995 on a New York City bus while wearing a turban. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Dhillon sought to protect Sikhs who experienced civil-rights violations.

During a campaign for a party leadership post in 2013, she endured ethnically tinged attacks from fellow Republicans who called her a “Taj Mahal princess.”

Dhillon moved to San Francisco in 2003 and rose in politics there, where she said Republicans felt forced to hide. Dhillon became leader of the California Republican Party in 2016.

Dhillon’s approach at the Justice Department has drawn praise on the right and condemnation from traditional civil-rights advocates, but there is widespread agreement that it is unconventional.

The Trump administration, for example, is adopting an approach typically used to investigate misconduct in police departments to examine whether the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department systemically violates residents’ gun rights. Dhillon has said she hopes to do more.

Her Chicago probe came after Mayor Brandon Johnson, speaking at a local church, highlighted the number of Black people he had put in senior roles.

“If these kind of hiring decisions are being made for top-level positions in your administration, then it begs the question whether such decisions are also being made for lower-level positions,” Dhillon wrote in a letter to Johnson. The mayor called the probe divisive.

The division is “twisting itself into a weapon against civil rights,” Maya Wiley, chief executive of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said last week after Dhillon moved to drop Biden-era lawsuits alleging unconstitutional policing in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky.

Dhillon said criticisms of her approach are “untethered to reality” and ignore her work as an attorney representing refugees, workers, domestic-violence victims and those abused by police.

Some religious groups have voiced support for Dhillon, pointing to her focus on antisemitism during college campus protests of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

Nathan Diament, the executive director of the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center, said Dhillon has been receptive to the Jewish organization’s suggestions, including that she issue guidance to local authorities on what constitutes free speech versus harassment and discrimination. “She said they are working on that actively,” Diament said.

After two Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead outside a Jewish museum on Wednesday, Dhillon said on X that the civil-rights division stood “ready to seek justice for the victims and families of this shocking crime in our capital. We have been pushing hard on these issues, but we must do more.”

Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com

Harmeet Dhillon’s Civil-Rights Revolution Comes With Tea and Roses