Donald Trump’s nominee to oversee the federal government’s enforcement of civil rights has spent the last year leading a legal crusade against transgender Americans, signaling where Trump could start with his “day one” pledge to roll back discrimination protections.
Harmeet Dhillon, founder of the Center for American Liberty, has filed a barrage of attention-grabbing lawsuits on behalf of right-wing activists against gender-affirming healthcare and school policies and state and local laws designed to protect LGBT+ people across the country.
Dhillon also supported efforts to reverse election results in states Trump lost in 2020, and she steered the Trump campaign’s 2024 “election integrity” team in Arizona, a hotbed for bogus election conspiracy theories in the wake of Trump’s loss.
Dhillon and attorneys at her firm have been involved in at least 16 lawsuits across seven states and Washington, D.C. to defend Trump and challenge voting rights laws and election rules.
Dhillon — whose firm has received more than $8 million in legal fees from Trump’s team — is yet another attorney who has represented the former president or joined in his legal battles before receiving his nomination for a top post at the Department of Justice.
If she’s confirmed to lead the civil rights division, she will be in a uniquely powerful position to reshape, and reverse, critical protections for LGBT+ Americans while keeping Trump’s election denialist movement alive at the top of the Justice Department.
Trump also shares Dhillon with far-right billionaire Elon Musk, who hired her firm Dhillon Law Group for X’s lawsuit against a group of advertisers who are boycotting his platform.
“Harmeet is one of the top Election lawyers in the Country, fighting to ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted,” Trump said in a statement announcing Dhillon’s nomination on December 9. “In her new role at the DOJ, Harmeet will be a tireless defender of our Constitutional Rights, and will enforce our Civil Rights and Election Laws FAIRLY and FIRMLY.”
Dhillon’s Center for American Liberty has filed several medical malpractice lawsuits on behalf of so-called “detransitioners” who now argue against access to gender-affirming healthcare for trans minors by speaking publicly about their regret.
The group also threatened legal action and sued several schools over policies that could be used to forcibly out LGBT+ students — policies that Dhillon argues are causing “irreparable harm to children” by violating parents’ rights.
One lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District accuses schools of “hiding classroom curriculum on transgenderism and critical race theory.”
The group also sued teachers and schools in Maine on behalf of a right-wing activist who opposed school policies that allow trans students to use bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity.
The Center for American Liberty also sued the YMCA on behalf of an 82-year-old woman who claimed she saw a “grown man” wearing a “women’s bathing suit” and talking to two young girls in a changing room.
That “grown man” was a transgender YMCA employee escorting the girls to the bathroom. Julie Jaman asked her if she “had a penis” and was then asked to leave. The Olympic Peninsula YMCA later told Jaman that she was banned for life due to a “pattern of code of conduct violations.”
State laws that protect transgender care and abortion providers and patients from out-of-state prosecution are “horrifying” and “super extreme” measures that will turn states into a “refuge for child mutilation,” according to Dhillon and her Center for American Liberty.
More than a dozen states have enacted so-called “shield” laws, but anti-trans and anti-abortion activists are demanding federal government pre-emption that would outlaw affirming care and abortion access despite state and local projections.
The Biden administration’s expanded anti-discrimination protections for LGBT+ students under Title IX — which prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools — are a “slap in the face to women and girls,” according to Dhillon.
“Congress intended Title IX to protect women, not feelings or caricatures of women,” she said. ”But the Biden administration just robbed women of equal opportunities — taking from women and giving to men.”
On November 5, 2020, as votes were still being tallied in several states, Dhillon appeared on Fox Business to baselessly suggest election workers in Biden-Harris masks were manipulating ballots in Philadelphia.
“We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court, [in] which the president has nominated three justices, to step in and do something,” she said. “Hopefully, Amy Coney Barrett will come through and pick it up. There’s no guarantee … so we have to fight this on the ground and make sure that we challenge every place and we are.”
She later joined Trump’s legal team to defend him against legal challenges to his ballot eligibility in Colorado, a case that did make its way to the Supreme Court.
A group of Colorado voters argued that Trump is ineligible for the presidency under the scope of the 14th Amendment, which bars anyone who has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution and “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding public office. Similar challenges were filed in a dozen states.
The Supreme Court ultimately reversed a Colorado court decision that found Trump unconstitutionally eligible for the president because of his role surrounding the Capitol attack on January 6, what Dhillon called “dangerous overreach that, if left unchallenged, could have set a perilous precedent for future election.”
During midterm elections in 2022, election-denying conspiracy theorists Kari Lake and Abraham Hamadeh hired Dhillon’s firm to contest election results in Arizona, where Lake and Hamadeh lost their campaigns for governor and attorney general, respectively. Dhillon was later named to run the Trump campaign’s “election integrity team” in that state.
