New head of DOJ's Civil Rights Division, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, says, "The Second Amendment is a civil right," and vows to have the Civil Rights Division - for the first time on behalf of the DOJ - go after states when laws infringe on that civil right.
"…[N]ot only are we going to continue the mission of the Civil Rights Division, the traditional, core functions, there are a lot ofnew functions that our president wantsus to be looking at, and new functions that I want to do.For example, the Second Amendment is a civil right. The Civil Rights Division has never gone after states that systematically violate our right under Bruen and other Supreme decisions to carry weapons, to bear arms, to keep them in our homes. We’re going to be doing that in the Civil Rights Division."
https://dailycaller.com/2025/04/28/exclusive-harmeet-dhillon-reveals-whats-next-doj-civil-rights-division/
Most reporting had focused on the "mass exodus" of lawyers under her leadership. She explains:
"We have changed the priorities, not the mission, the priorities, in each of the sections in the Civil Rights Division.Some personnel here have decided that they’d rather make their careers elsewhere. So there’ll be quite a bit of turnover here in the Civil Rights Division."
She further explained:
"The Civil Rights Division is one of the largest litigating departments of the United States Department of Justice, and you’re correct, a lot of the most notorious, headline-grabbing policies out of the Biden DOJ came from the Civil Rights Division."
"For example, the Civil Rights Division was responsible for challenging Georgia’s election laws. The DOJ took it upon itself to harass Georgia over doing the right thing. The DOJ Civil Rights Division spent a lot of resources persecuting Christians for praying outside abortion clinics, not violently, not in any way obstructing people, just praying. That’s outrageous, and we’ve dismissed those prosecutions. The Civil Rights Division has been bringing and maintaining, I think, pretty flimsy cases against police departments and other law enforcement agencies for alleged statistical anomalies in arrest rates, very small anomalies. Statistics are easily manipulated."
"We are here to absolutely punish misconduct by the police, by employers, by housing agencies that discriminate against people, by educational institutions that discriminate against students and a whole host of other civil rights statutes. There’s human trafficking, certain human trafficking statues come under our purview."
"We’re required to enforce the federal civil rights laws. So all of that is going to continue to be done under the Civil Rights Division, disability law and all of that, but the emphasis is going to be different. It isn’t going to be on opening up investigations and harassing people endlessly and maintaining 40-and 50-year-old consent decrees. It’s going to be examining wrongdoing or alleged wrongdoing and determining quickly whether it occurred or not. If it does, we’ll go after it. If it doesn’t, we’ll move on."
"More importantly, I think the rights of ordinary Americans over the last years have been stripped and violated. The First Amendment: during COVID, we saw so many violations of civil rights in every single area, which is something that I took on as a private lawyer. The FACE [Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances] Act can be used to protect clinics where women get counseling about their options for abortion, and 200 of those have been violently attacked, firebombed, picketed and otherwise been obstructed over the last few years with zero action from the DOJ. That’s going to change."
…
"After the Biden administration spent four years “weaponizing” her division, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon says that she needs more “energized attorneys” to help her spearhead new initiatives to protect rights that have been trampled on in the past years."
https://dailycaller.com/2025/04/28/exclusive-harmeet-dhillon-reveals-whats-next-doj-civil-rights-division/