‘Anti-woke’: Trump’s Department of Justice may dismantle DEI protections

Donald Trump’s war on “woke” is picking up.

The president elect has tapped conservative San Francisco attorney Harmeet Dhillon to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, who may soon dismantle the organization’s civil rights protections in a ghoulishly ironic twist. Dhillon is a MAGA aligned lawyer who has earned Trump’s praise for “suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.” Dhillon made a name for herself by picking legal battles against everything from transgender protections to racial equity in service of a greater right-wing culture war. Like many of Trump’s picks, she is also a frequent guest on Fox News.

If confirmed to the position, Dhillon could use her status to wage war against progressive issues from inside the very organization dedicated to championing them. Under Dhillon, transgender protections and DEI practices at government and educational institutions across America could be in jeopardy. Given Dhillon’s legal track record, she will likely continue to try and tear down civil rights practices across the nation.

According to Justin Levitt, who served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division under President Obama, Dhillon is the antithesis of everything the division stands for. Levitt argues that the Division’s “historical mandate” was to ” help fight against societal branding of certain Americans as other.” He believes that the Dhillon’s past history confirms that she is more concerned with “branding people as other rather than fighting against it.

According to a source close to the Trump administration, Trump and his allies believe that GOP control over the Civil Rights Division will be key to aligning the greater Justice Department towards a conservative stance on civil rights. While the Civil Rights Department saw a flurry of activity during the Biden Administration, the organization was largely inactive during Trump’s first term in office. In the eyes of the Trump administration, the Civil Rights Department is at its best when it is doing next to nothing at all.

“Harmeet Dhillon is very conservative and hardly a champion of civil rights as it is generally understood,” writes UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsk. According to Chemerinsk, Dhillon is only interested in battling for the rights of conservatives, citing her cases involving Covid restrictions and the rights of Christians. “There is nothing in her record about fighting discrimination based on race or sex or sexual orientation or gender identity,” he conclude.

The president elect’s praise of Dhillon only lends credence to Chemerinsk’s point of view. “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,” Donald Trump said in a statement.

The president elect did not mention minorities—the groups that the Civil Rights Division has historically been chiefly concerned with protecting. His statement also served to further erode trust in the election process, and he praised Dhillon’s work to “ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted.” With Dhillon at the helm, the Civil Rights Division will likely become a parody of what it once was. Rather than protecting the rights of the vulnerable, it will cement the privileges of those who hold social power, exactly as Trump and his allies intend.