Harmeet Dhillon Is Not Wasting Any Time

Last May, one month into her time as the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon stood behind the lectern at a meeting of the conservative Federalist Society and set out her vision for the Justice Department’s civil-rights work. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we have a generational opportunity for a reformation,” she told the lawyers assembled at the tony Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. Her goal, she said, was to “focus on turning the train around and driving in the opposite direction.”

Born amid the civil-rights movement, the division that Dhillon now leads is often called the “crown jewel” of the Justice Department. It earned that reputation because of its mission to protect and defend people who find themselves in positions of powerlessness. For nearly 70 years, its attorneys have investigated hate crimes and police abuses, worked to combat discrimination, and enforced the protections enshrined in statutes such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The division is responsible for civil enforcement as well as criminal law: Civil Rights Division attorneys led the prosecution of Ku Klux Klan members responsible for the 1964 murder of three civil-rights advocates during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. As time went on, Congress assigned the division responsibility to protect the rights of other groups, such as immigrants, disabled people, and military service members.

On Dhillon’s watch, this commitment to civil rights has been turned upside down. Consistent with Trump’s stated belief that “white people were very badly treated,” the new Civil Rights Division seems primarily concerned with correcting the perceived wrongs of past civil-rights enforcement. Since the beginning of his second term, Trump has worked to transform the Department of Justice into his personal law firm, a machine for manifesting his will and producing the policy outcomes his MAGA base dreams of—and Dhillon has devoted herself to reshaping the Civil Rights Division in this image. Her ambition may soon propel her up the ranks of a Justice Department thrown into chaos by Trump’s recent firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi. Dhillon’s name has circulated as a potential candidate for associate attorney general—the department’s third in command—or even for the top job itself.

Although Dhillon declined a request to be interviewed, she frequently posts on X and appears on right-leaning television networks and podcasts. She is not shy about her goals, telling one host that no Republican before her was bold enough to take the necessary steps to overhaul the Civil Rights Division. “Nobody had that vision of, like, We’re going to brutally change this place to how it should be,” she said. “And we’re going to change it permanently.”

She has used the branch’s resources to investigate school districts and colleges over DEI, back the White House’s push to gain Republican congressional seats through redistricting, and prosecute journalists covering an anti-ICE protest in Minnesota. Rather than participate in this distortion of their mission, Civil Rights Division employees have departed at rates that stand out even amid the general hemorrhaging of legal talent from the DOJ. Of the roughly 700 people who staffed the division as of January 2025, nearly 400 have left, including the overwhelming majority of the branch’s lawyers. An analysis by Bloomberg Law last fall found that 76 percent of employees in leadership roles had departed the Civil Rights Division, compared with 33 percent across the entire DOJ.

[Paul Rosenzweig: The destruction of the Department of Justice]

I spoke with more than a dozen current and former employees of the division—some of them recent departures, and some who left shortly after the new administration began. “There are always some changes between Republican and Democratic administrations when it comes to the Civil Rights Division, most of which are slight,” Stacey Young explained to me. Young, who quit her job as an attorney in the division shortly into the new administration, now leads Justice Connection, a group that provides legal counsel and networking opportunities for current and former DOJ staffers. Democratic leadership, Young said, has tended to scale up the division’s work; Republicans have often scaled it down, de-emphasizing voting rights and emphasizing religious-liberty cases. Still, attorneys hired as apolitical civil servants were accustomed to continuing their work more or less consistently across administrations—a trend that held stable even during the first Trump presidency. “You saw different priorities,” Young said. “But nobody ever took a wrecking ball to the entire division.”

Dhillon’s leadership of the division is both the next step in the natural progression of a career spent needling liberals and a preview of what is to come if she continues to rise within the Justice Department. As a college student at Dartmouth, where she graduated in 1989, she joined a group of conservatives aiming to infuriate their lefty peers; later, she raised her profile within MAGA by litigating cases at the center of the culture wars. But roughly a year into her time as assistant attorney general for civil rights, she is struggling—both to recruit new talent to fill the emptied halls of the division and to win lawsuits that have faced setbacks in front of skeptical judges. Dhillon, an Indian American immigrant who talks often about her Sikh faith, has long cultivated a brash, confrontational streak that has brought her to prominence within the Republican Party. But the MAGA movement’s shift toward outspoken nativism leaves little room for someone of Dhillon’s background. She is at the top of her game, yet her position has never appeared more precarious.

Two days after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, while the Civil Rights Division waited for Dhillon to be confirmed by the Senate, the DOJ’s new leadership sent out a memo demanding that the division “freeze” its ongoing litigation “to ensure that the President’s appointees or designees have the opportunity to decide whether to initiate any new cases.” Then, top officials in the branch’s Appellate Section were abruptly reassigned to a new working group on “Sanctuary Cities Enforcement”—a move widely understood internally to be a way of sidelining career leadership and driving them to quit.

During that early period, “things came to a grinding halt” in the division, Ejaz Baluch Jr., who litigated employment-discrimination cases from 2019 until he left last May, told me: “We were hopeful that once Harmeet Dhillon was in and confirmed, we were going to get moving again.”

Many of the current or former career Civil Rights Division attorneys I spoke with had never actually met Dhillon or even heard anything directly from her other than a single email introducing herself. The few who described speaking with her told me that their interactions had been very brief—just a short, awkward hello. And that, they all agreed, was unusual. “Typically, when new heads of division come in, one of the early things they want to do is to meet and get to know the chiefs of the different sections,” Rebecca Bond, who led the division’s Disability Rights Section and departed the DOJ in May 2025, told me. “Dhillon expressed no interest in getting to know us.” On X, Dhillon was posting cheerily about her new job and asking her followers whether she should lease a Tesla. But as far as the division’s career staff were concerned, her office was a black box.

One of Dhillon’s first acts as the head of the Civil Rights Division was to terminate a 2023 settlement to help install functioning sanitation in Lowndes County, Alabama—a poor, predominately Black area where inadequate septic systems had long left residents struggling with raw sewage pooling in backyards and bubbling up in bathtubs. Cleaning up sewage might sound like a nonpartisan victory, but there was a problem: The DOJ had negotiated the settlement as part of a Biden-administration push for environmental justice, which put the county in the crosshairs of Trump’s new anti-DEI executive order. Dhillon asserted that the settlement violated Trump’s directive. “The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,” she said in a statement.

“The lack of basic sanitation in America, in my view, is the kind of problem that the federal government should be helping to solve, not making worse,” Christine Stoneman told me. Stoneman, who ran the section responsible for overseeing implementation of the Lowndes County settlement, chose to depart the DOJ shortly after the agreement was axed. Dhillon’s abrupt public announcement of the cancellation, Stoneman said, signaled that “the administration’s view was that enforcing civil rights in and of itself was illegal DEI.”

Then came a flood of memos—“mission statements” that Dhillon had developed for each section of the division—focused on enforcing Trump’s executive orders. But staff also noticed what many of the statements were missing: references to several statutes that Congress had charged the DOJ with enforcing, such as the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and Title II of the Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination in public accommodations.

The troubling implication, several former attorneys at the division told me, was that the president’s preferences were more important than federal law in guiding their work. Every section of the Civil Rights Division “has statutes or constitutional provisions that they are tasked with enforcing,” Young explained—responsibilities given to the Justice Department by Congress. To emphasize executive orders over those legislative mandates constituted, to her, “a flagrant perversion of the separation of powers.” (The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on this article.)

In the first months of last year, few people in the Civil Rights Division opted for the “deferred resignation” plan offered by DOGE, former lawyers at the division said. Employees were similarly reluctant when Dhillon sent out a renewed resignation offer to the division in April 2025, until Dhillon’s office once again began shuffling staff around without explanation, moving attorneys who held leadership roles into menial jobs and others into positions that had nothing to do with their area of expertise. Then, Baluch said, “the mass exodus began.” By May of that year, roughly 70 percent of the division’s lawyers were gone.

DOGE initiated the deferred-resignation program in the name of slimming down the government. But recently, when the Justice Department released its 2027 budget plan to Congress, the Civil Rights Division’s request included funding to restaff the branch up to roughly 90 percent of its 2024 level. To current and former attorneys at the division, this seemed like a giveaway: The goal, they theorized to me, had not been to cut government spending but to get rid of civil servants who had served administrations of both parties, and then bring in new lawyers who were more ideologically aligned with the new administration. “I think that part of purging staff was a way to get people out who know how the institution is supposed to work,” Robyn Bitner, a former attorney in the division’s Special Litigation Section who’d struggled with the decision of whether to take the deferred-resignation offer, told me. “When I left, I doubted if it was the right choice. But some of the people who stayed longer than me have also doubted it was the right choice.”

Early on, Dhillon sounded triumphant over the resignations. “The job here is to enforce the federal civil-rights laws, not woke ideology,” she said to Glenn Beck in April 2025, shortly before the deadline for employees to decide whether to take the resignation offer. Speaking with Tucker Carlson the next month, she derided “hundreds” of the division’s career attorneys as having been “actively in resistance mode” and ridiculed what she described as “crying sessions” held by departing staff. “We’re trying to change” the division’s culture, Dhillon told Carlson. As she explained her vision, “We should be standing up for the civil rights of all Americans, not just some Americans.”

Many of the former DOJ lawyers I spoke with were frustrated by Dhillon’s comments. “The Civil Rights Division of old really did enforce the law on behalf of all Americans,” Baluch argued. Dhillon, he said, claims that attorneys departed because they wanted to prioritize the rights of some groups above others—but “that’s exactly what she’s doing.”

Dhillon stands out among the overwhelmingly white, male nominees selected for top positions by the second Trump administration. Her parents, Punjabi Sikhs, moved the family from India to London and then to the United States when Dhillon was a young girl, settling in small-town North Carolina. There, they became committed Republicans. In a state long run by Dixiecrats, Dhillon explained in an interview with the conservative advocacy organization PragerU, “it was the Republicans who were in favor of integration and of equal rights for all people.” She was not wrong that North Carolina Democrats were slow to adopt the cause of civil rights, but the state’s Republicans weren’t exactly advocates of racial equality: Her parents hosted fundraisers for Senator Jesse Helms, an ardent segregationist who cultivated ties with Sikh activists in India and the United States.

As a student at Dartmouth College, Dhillon doubled down on her political beliefs with a combativeness that foreshadowed her later commitment to MAGA. She joined the right-wing student publication The Dartmouth Review, an incubator for firebrands such as Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. As editor in chief, she approved the publication of a satirical column that likened the college’s Jewish president to Hitler—a provocation, she explained to a New York Times reporter at the time, meant to highlight the oppression of conservative students by “liberal fascism.” In a 1988 60 Minutes segment on Dartmouth’s struggles with the Review, she can be seen briefly in a matching pearl necklace and earrings, insisting in a low, confident voice that a Review writer’s choice to compare a Black professor’s face to a “mud pie” was not racist but merely “descriptive.” Dartmouth’s beleaguered president, interviewed later in the segment, wearily explains that the student troublemakers have become “intoxicated” with their power to command attention from the national press.

Shortly after Trump’s second inauguration, my Atlantic colleague David Brooks—then at the Times—reflected that The Dartmouth Review’s confrontational ethos was a precursor to MAGA. As with Trumpism, the newspaper’s political commitments existed primarily as a means of eliciting horror or frustration from a hypothetical liberal onlooker—a practice that today is known online as “owning the libs” and that the second Trump administration, with its trolling X posts, has elevated to a core principle of governance. This particular flavor of conservatism thrived not in the heartland but also in spaces of real or imagined liberal dominance, where it could present itself as raffishly heterodox in the face of a left-leaning consensus. As Brooks put it, the Review’s political posture was that of “elite dissenters from the university culture.”

Throughout her time in public life, Dhillon has retained that posture of elite dissent. “All the work I did involving free speech and being a journalist led me down the path to law school,” she told Dartmouth’s alumni magazine this past fall. As a student at the University of Virginia School of Law, she became president of the Federalist Society’s UVA chapter. Later, she moved to deep-blue San Francisco, where she would become active in the perennially outmatched California GOP. Gathering Republicans in the Bay Area, Dhillon would later tell The Wall Street Journal, was “kind of like the Underground Railroad.”

During this period, Dhillon moved away from the Review’s gleeful offensiveness toward positions suggesting a more moderate conservatism. After 9/11, she advocated for the rights of Sikhs harassed and discriminated against in the wave of anti-Muslim sentiment, and served for two years on the board of the ACLU of Northern California. A 2011 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle described Dhillon—then the chair of the city’s Republican Party—as a “different kind of Republican” who supported a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

But Dhillon’s apparent moderation during that time might also be read as a different way of communicating the same underlying heterodoxy from her Review days. She was presenting herself as someone who upended both conservative and liberal conceptions of what a GOP stalwart should be. “My job is to bust a lot of stereotypes about the Republican Party,” she explained to the Journal. Even while establishing herself within the GOP, she refused to back away from her ethnic and religious heritage. “I’m not Nikki Haley, and I’m not Bobby Jindal,” she told Bloomberg in 2018, referencing two Indian American politicians who’d both converted to Christianity. “I’ve never been looking to assume that assimilation mentality.” Dhillon, an avid knitter, also used her hobby to counter stereotypes. She founded a small business that produced environmentally friendly yarn and knitwear from the wool of local sheep, explaining to a Bay Area reporter, “It’s a conservative value to not rely on foreign labor and materials.”

Dhillon’s rise was well suited to a Republican Party looking to reinvent itself and court immigrants after Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat. In 2013, Governing magazine covered her victorious campaign to serve as vice chair of the California Republican Party as a glimpse into “what the GOP will need to do to win elections nationally in the coming era of the white minority.” But after Trump seized control of the party apparatus in 2016, Dhillon adapted quickly to the GOP’s new personality. She returned to her role as a no-holds-barred culture warrior, taking on clients such as James Damore, the Google employee fired in 2017 after he circulated a memo that criticized many of the company’s efforts to create a diverse workplace and suggested that, in general, women might be less biologically suited for working in tech. Google had courted the “furries and transgender” while discriminating against conservative men, Dhillon told Bloomberg. She filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, which was settled out of court.

The Damore case raised Dhillon’s prominence on the right. She began appearing regularly on Fox News and boosted her reach on Twitter. In 2020, the Trump campaign named her as a co-chair of Lawyers for Trump, a coalition of attorneys that would go on to contest his loss to Joe Biden—although Dhillon proved skilled at keeping her distance from the more outlandish claims made by Trump’s team both in court and on television. Four years later, her law firm helped defend against challenges to Trump’s eligibility for the ballot because of his role in encouraging the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

Even as Dhillon tied herself more closely to Trump, however, MAGA’s shift toward explicit white supremacy and Christian nationalism left her footing in the movement less than secure. The movement’s obsession with smashing through taboos ended up targeting not just the liberal commitments that Dhillon herself delighted in skewering but also her own ethnic and religious background. During her unsuccessful 2023 run for chair of the Republican National Committee, opponents within the party were rumored to have argued that her faith might make her unsuitable for the role. In 2016, after Dhillon performed a Sikh prayer at the Republican National Convention, she lauded the GOP to a reporter as “inclusive.” But when she led the 2024 convention in the same prayer, far-right influencers on X exploded with racist bile over what they characterized as “blasphemy” and “witchcraft.” Later, in an interview with the right-leaning Free Press, Dhillon slammed the attacks as “blatant racism and nativism.” Still, she told the publication that she did not consider her harassers to be representative of the GOP as a whole. “The president has been nothing but nice and kind to me,” she said.

During the second Trump administration, Dhillon has rejected her earlier moderation on immigration and moved toward a hard-liner approach in keeping with the president’s priorities. (Recently, she suggested that the United States should work to become a society where “the foreign medical graduate, the foreign engineer, the foreign CEO is an exception.”) Still, she emphasized her immigrant story during her February 2025 confirmation hearing, telling senators, “We as a family are Americans by choice.” Her experience working as Trump’s lawyer had taught her the danger of a Justice Department “weaponized for the wrong ends.” “What I will never do,” she promised, “is use the DOJ Civil Rights Division as a partisan tool to push a political agenda.”

Within months of her arrival, Dhillon had reshaped the work of her newly trimmed division. The Employment Litigation Section turned its focus toward investigations of DEI programs and other efforts to increase diversity in hiring. “When Harmeet came in, we had a number of race-discrimination lawsuits that we had to dismiss, because we were directed to by the Justice Department,” Dena Robinson, a former colleague of Baluch’s who also left the division, recalled. The Immigrant and Employee Rights Section, which had historically investigated cases of discrimination against immigrants in favor of Americans, was likewise repurposed: “Are you an American citizen who has been harmed by inappropriate preferences for foreign workers, eg H1-B or other?” Dhillon posted on X. The flood of reports sent to the DOJ after her solicitation overwhelmed the few remaining attorneys, who were forced to rush to meet a legal deadline requiring the division to examine all such submissions within 10 days of their filing.

Dhillon pushed forward aggressively on the administration’s program of investigating top universities for anti-Semitism and affirmative action in hiring and admissions, playing a key role in pushing out the embattled president of the University of Virginia—who’d attended the law school there around the same time as Dhillon. Under her leadership, the division has refocused its work using Title IX—which forbids sex discrimination in education—away from combatting sexual harassment on campus and toward scrutiny of school policies on transgender athletes. She retracted the findings of several investigations into police misconduct carried out under the Biden administration and moved to dismiss pending and existing consent decrees with police departments across the country that she characterized as federal overreach. Instead, she found a different purpose for the statute empowering the division to probe police wrongdoing, using it as a basis to create a new Second Amendment Section. The section quickly filed a lawsuit against Washington, D.C.’s ban on semiautomatic firearms.

Dhillon’s supporters applaud her reorientation of the division. “Harmeet is a lawyer’s lawyer,” Kenneth Marcus, the leader of the Brandeis Center, a Jewish-civil-rights group, told me. “While she is clearly coming from a conservative perspective, she’s also someone who is committed to following the plain meaning of the statutes that she’s charged with enforcing.” Marcus, who expressed strong support for Dhillon’s role in the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign against campus anti-Semitism, noted her “outspoken” willingness to jump into the political fray—which he attributed to both her personality and “the fact that the Trump II administration has generally provided more leeway for officials to speak out even on controversial public issues.”

“One of the most activist areas of the Civil Rights Division in history has been the use of the Voting Rights Act to effectively change outcomes,” Dhillon told the Christian conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey in a January interview. Instead of litigating to protect the right to vote, the division has focused on demanding unprecedented access to state voter rolls for reasons that remain opaque. After Trump pressured Texas to redraw its congressional districts to benefit Republicans in the 2026 midterms, Dhillon signed a letter supporting the effort. But when California organized a Democratic-leaning redistricting in response, her division joined a lawsuit against the plan. (Dhillon, whose old law firm had filed the suit, recused herself.)

Press releases published by the division show that some of the branch’s traditional work, particularly in support of disability rights, is still getting done. Xiao Wang, a law professor at the University of Virginia, told me that Dhillon had emphasized continuity in the Civil Rights Division across administrations at a March event convened by the Federalist Society’s UVA Law chapter. During the conversation, which Wang moderated, Dhillon also referred to several recent lawsuits that the division brought against landlords for sexually assaulting and harassing female tenants. Wang, who described himself as inclined to “lower the temperature” and seek consensus on civil-rights issues, seemed to find Dhillon’s point reasonable—although, he said, he could understand objections to the “tenor and tone” of some of the division’s current work. In Wang’s recollection, Dhillon suggested that the press had chosen to focus on the division’s more controversial projects rather than its nonpartisan cases.

When Dhillon posts on X about her job, though, it is usually to promote the division’s work on contentious social issues. She shares news about DOJ actions and right-wing victories over liberals via posts reading “FAFO” (“fuck around and find out”) and dismisses critics as “hoes” and “retards”—a notable choice for the official trusted to enforce statutes on sexual assault and protect intellectually disabled people under the Americans With Disabilities Act. “I’ve been stuck at the same level of followers on this account pretty much since I started my government job,” she complained in one post, asking “what kind of content” her followers wanted to see. On Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Dhillon commented that the “lamestream media” had criticized her for “being perpetually online. But that’s actually where I see a lot of the civil-rights violations in our country being exposed.”

Still, former division employees questioned to what extent those projects were engineered by Dhillon and to what extent she was implementing instructions from higher up, in a breach of the Justice Department’s traditional independence. Baluch and Robinson, who were both assigned to investigate the University of California system for anti-Semitism in hiring, recalled an intense political push to make progress on a probe with, in their view, little factual basis—a push that seemed to be coming from outside the division. Attorneys were given one month to find evidence to justify what seemed to be a preordained complaint against the UC system. Baluch recalled how Dhillon’s deputy, Gregory Brown, said of the investigation, “We’re under a lot of pressure to bring this case.”

“He didn’t say who he was talking about,” Baluch said. “But there’s only two real possibilities.” The pressure, he surmised, was coming from either the attorney general or the White House.

One attorney, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, described a perception that Dhillon was not fully in control of the division’s staffing. This lawyer, who quit after being reassigned and demoted, recalled being informed by one of Dhillon’s aides that the decision to push out career leadership had not been made by the assistant attorney general. “She’s more of a soldier than a strategist,” the lawyer said. “She positioned herself as the person to carry out this agenda. But I don’t believe she originated it.”

Asked whether this lawyer’s account was accurate, the DOJ did not respond. Dhillon, however, has previously rejected the idea that the Justice Department should be independent from the president. The department “is an instrumentality of the executive branch,” she told The Free Press.

After a crusading summer, Dhillon hit a rough patch last fall. In October, she traveled to Puerto Rico to argue a case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit—a rare though not unheard-of practice for an assistant attorney general—only to trip up and repeatedly concede points key to the government’s argument. The next month, a panel of federal judges struck down Texas’s mid-decade redistricting plan, in significant part on the basis of Dhillon’s letter supporting the creation of a new map. The letter had proved “challenging to unpack,” the Trump-appointed Judge Jeffrey Brown wrote, “because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors.” During litigation over the map, even Texas’s own lawyers excoriated Dhillon’s intervention as “ham-fisted” and “legally unsound.” (The Supreme Court allowed Texas to move forward with redistricting regardless.)

In January, district judges began tossing out Dhillon’s attempts to get ahold of state voter rolls. “It seems the Executive Branch of the United States government wants to abridge the right of many Americans to cast their ballots,” wrote Judge David Carter of the U.S. Court for the Central District of California. Four federal courts have now rejected Dhillon’s position, and the only data she has received have been provided voluntarily by a dozen red states. She has continued to press on, however, filing new litigation against six more states—including four led by Republicans. One, Oklahoma, has since agreed to hand over its voter rolls, but leaders in the other red states have been more defiant: “Bring it on!” read a statement from the office of the West Virginia secretary of state.

Some of Dhillon’s high-profile efforts have displayed signs of strain from the beginning. In January, after Dhillon declined to investigate the shooting death of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, prosecutors in Minnesota quit in protest, and leaders in the Civil Rights Division’s Criminal Section sped up their plans to retire. Instead, Dhillon scrambled to bring charges over an anti-ICE demonstration inside a St. Paul church, prosecuting the protesters as well as two journalists who covered the incident. Despite her triumphant X posts, the case seems unlikely to go anywhere. The legal theory behind it is questionable at best, and the court filings—signed only by new hires—suggest that more experienced prosecutors wanted nothing to do with the matter.

[Quinta Jurecic: The case against Don Lemon is junk, and dangerous]

As the St. Paul case suggests, some of Dhillon’s problems in court may have to do with the division’s struggle to fill its newly emptied ranks with competent, MAGA-friendly attorneys. In late March, Dhillon told The Wall Street Journal that the division’s staffing is “back to about 50 percent right now.” At least two attorneys out of the dozens of recent hires were forced out of their old jobs as local prosecutors because of alleged misconduct.

Coreen Kopper, who worked as a trial attorney at the division, told me that the mass resignations had delayed progress even on investigations that appeared to be a top priority. As other lawyers quit, she said, she wound up as the sole attorney assigned to an investigation into DEI employment practices at the University of California—and watched in bewilderment when, as Dhillon testified before a Senate panel in July, Republican Senator Eric Schmitt touted the probe as a “major civil-rights investigation.” “I’m like, What are you talking about?” Kopper remembered thinking. “It’s just me. There’s nobody else.” She quit soon afterward and was unsure how long the investigation had languished with no one to take the lead. The Civil Rights Division does not appear to have made any public steps in the probe, although it recently joined a lawsuit against UCLA’s medical school over discrimination in admissions and filed its own case against UCLA based on the allegations of anti-Semitism that Baluch and Robinson had been tasked with investigating.

Pushing out the division’s career staff allowed Dhillon to move forward with reshaping the Civil Rights Division into a weapon for conservatives. But this loss of horsepower and expertise has come at the cost of her own effectiveness in the role—if, that is, effectiveness is really the goal to begin with. When I asked Baluch for his thoughts on the UCLA anti-Semitism lawsuit, he sounded frustrated with the complaint’s legal sloppiness and reliance on questionable anecdotes. “This complaint ended up coming out in late February 2026, almost one year after when we were initially told we had one month to bring a lawsuit (March 2025),” he wrote to me in a text. “They could have allowed us to take the time to do a legitimate investigation.” Kopper expressed a similar view. “Are there some cases of legitimate civil-rights violations that are within administration priorities? Sure,” she said. Yet the DOJ seemed uninterested in seriously identifying and pursuing those cases. Instead, in her experience, the division focused on “going after political enemies” in whatever way would make the biggest impact on X.

So far, Dhillon seems to have dealt with her failures in court by doubling down on her self-presentation as a MAGA warrior on social media. That approach may pay dividends: After Bondi’s firing, a number of pro-Trump personalities on X hurried to suggest Dhillon as a candidate for attorney general. Still, not every corner of the platform is so enthusiastic. The immediate gratification demanded by right-wing influencers inevitably conflicts with the level of behind-the-scenes preparation required to bring even the most slapdash case in court. And the same frenetic online culture that feeds those demands has pushed the American right to further and further extremes. On X, Dhillon’s posts regularly accrue replies from Trump fans degrading her with racial slurs and telling her to return to India. Along similar lines, January 6 defendants and their advocates, who perceive Dhillon as insufficiently supportive of their cause, have voiced anger over her potential promotion.

[Jonathan Chait: Pam Bondi couldn’t possibly succeed]

Recently, Dhillon has begun to cautiously weigh in on the internecine struggle over what to do with the right’s farthest fringe. She joked on X about wanting a “groyper filter” to hide posts from fans of Nick Fuentes, a prominent white nationalist and Holocaust denier who has stoked anti-Indian racism. She rejected far-right criticism of her anti-Semitism investigations in a podcast interview with the right-wing influencer Jonathan Keeperman and the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who is attempting to halt Fuentes’s rise. When Rufo and Keeperman asked her about calls on the right for pro-white affirmative action, Dhillon responded stiffly, “I don’t think that’s going to be a productive solution.” She dismissed the preferences of hard-right anti-Semites and white nationalists as nothing more than “noise” confined to social media, without any constituency in the “real world.” But as Dhillon continues to stumble in court, online content is the primary medium by which her work is designed to be consumed.

Out in the real world, Dhillon’s project has already done a great deal of damage to the Civil Rights Division’s traditional mission—even if it ultimately falls short of its goals, and regardless of whether it nets Dhillon a promotion. Some of that damage manifests as needless intimidation or wasted time and money. Some of it remains hidden: the work that isn’t being done. But much of it takes the form of all the talent and combined years of institutional DOJ knowledge that have been lost. There are still lawyers in the Civil Rights Division doing their best to help people in need, but there aren’t enough of them. In Lowndes County, where Dhillon canceled the agreement to help install proper septic systems, residents are still struggling with sewage in their yards.

*Sources: Andrew Harnik / Getty; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty; Mark Wilson / Getty.