When Hermeet Dhillon was plucked from a private job to become head of one of the Justice Department’s most powerful divisions, she was given marching orders to fundamentally alter its priorities.
I noticed it immediately in my inbox. The daily flow of about a half dozen press releases from the department changed from the regular going after thought crimes to several significant lawsuits filed to protect Jews. That is deliberate, she told the Yated in an interview.
Dhillon, the assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s Civil Rights Division, is no stranger to religious discrimination. A Sikh born in India, she has for years fought a largely losing battle against government overreach, principally during the Covid pandemic when governors limited prayer gatherings and locked people down.
The latest fruit of Dhillon’s labors came on last week, when the Justice Department announced that it filed a lawsuit against a Muslim who refused to allow Jewish customers in his Jerusalem Coffee House in Oakland, California. The lawsuit alleges that Fathi Abdulrahim Harara ordered Jewish customers to leave his café. “You’re the guy with the hat. You’re the Jew. You’re the Zionist. We don’t want you in our coffee shop. Get out,” he told one customer.
Dhillon has also been active in combating official discrimination by municipalities, filing a statement of interest in Forestburgh, New York, over its use of zoning laws to keep Orthodox residents out, as well as in other cases.
She works closely with Leo Terrell, who heads the Antisemitism Task Force.
Dhillon, 55, established the Dhillon Law Group in 2006 in San Francisco. She began dabbling in politics shortly afterwards, running unsuccessfully for state senate in California. More recently, she made a bid in 2022 to chair the Republican National Committee. She was the choice of the MAGA crowd but lost to the then-chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel.
She suffered two tragedies last year, losing her husband in August and her father in September. She began her tenure in January of this year, at the start of President Trump’s administration.
How do I address you? Are you called General? Assistant General?
I don’t really care about these titles. On my part, you can call me Harmeet.
I want to ask you a question that is more political, but there’s also a lot of policy in there. The past four years, I would say — and I remember under President Obama’s eight years also — the Jewish community felt that the Justice Department was not there for us. We were not the preferred minority that they were there to protect. I don’t think there was a single case that they got involved in regarding the Orthodox Jewish community, either in municipal discrimination or discriminating against Orthodox Jews. They also worked against the interests of Shalom Mordechai Rubashkin and would not examine his case which was rife with prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, as well as antisemitism.
Now, with the Trump administration, under Attorney General Pam Bondi and yourself, things have changed drastically, and you’ve said that there are a few cases in which you are involved. Could you tell me on a political level, how did you turn this massive ship around in just four months?
Well, I don’t disagree with you in terms of the priorities of the prior Democratic administrations. I think President Trump has long been a friend of the Jewish community, and beyond that, we view the Civil Rights Division as here to protect all Americans. And, of course, Jewish Americans are part of the “all Americans.”
I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. I think the Department of Justice can properly perform its job to defend the civil rights of all Americans without preferring one group over the other.
What we’re seeing in the news right now is this specific need on behalf of the Jewish community to step up and bring cases that involve discrimination against them, be it in institutions of higher learning, or discrimination by zoning boards and municipalities or blockage of synagogues in cities throughout the United States by pro-Hamas protesters. These are all priorities that are covered by the Civil Rights Division.
In terms of turning the ship around, if you will, I made my priorities, which are the administration’s priorities, very clear in my second week here, communicating to the lawyers here in the division that the priorities are these priorities, and they come from these executive orders and policies, and of course they’re consistent with our statutory duties.
And, you know, that caused quite a few lawyers here to decide they didn’t want to work here anymore. That’s what it is. We’re going to have to wait until these hiring freezes lift to staff up, but with the attorneys who are here, we are pursuing various investigations and identifying new cases that we can bring or coordinating with U.S. attorneys’ offices, like last month’s hate crime prosecution in New York.
We’re moving on all fronts. Full speed ahead.
These attorneys who quit, is it because they didn’t have the expertise in areas which are the priority of the new administration, or is it that they disagreed with how you prioritize these civil rights cases?
I can’t speak for them, but there are eleven different sections in the Civil Rights Division.
How many attorneys?
There were 400 attorneys to start with. I think people had their reasons for quitting — some of them include the priorities I articulated, some of them include general antipathy to the Trump administration, some of them include retirement, so I don’t want to speak for any of them. But a significant number of them didn’t want to do what the job description said. When we put a call out for people to support our antisemitism task force work ordered by the White House, almost nobody raised their hands at the Civil Rights Division.
That kind of made it clear to me that people’s priorities are misaligned with our job duties. As we bring in new people, they will be aligned with our priorities to do this work on behalf of all Americans, and not in a partisan or biased, or discriminatory fashion.
It’s a little mystifying to me because if you look at areas where there are large Jewish populations, antisemitic crimes are by far the largest of all religion-based crimes. This always seemed to me like something that should raise red flags in the Civil Rights Division, and it just never did.
Well, it does now.
It seems like you’re issuing a call for people to file complaints when they are discriminated against.
They should file complaints, they should bring it to our attention, and the attention of their elected officials. We have an active and ongoing dialogue with various Jewish community leaders, including Orthodox and Chassidic. I think there are many ways to get to us, but we’re taking these complaints seriously.
And I’m actively looking for incidents of… I’m a person of faith myself; I think the blockage of houses of worship is a federal crime. So, we’re not looking only at civil discrimination complaints, but also criminal complaints.
To the Jewish community, since October 7th in particular, but even before that, it did feel a little like the Wild West in parts of the country. Law enforcement would say that there are certain things that they can’t enforce. We still have today demonstrations that turn antisemitic in areas with a lot of children, in front of schools, in front of synagogues, and the police are saying over here that it’s legal. The local prosecutors, district attorneys, don’t prosecute those cases.
To be clear, a certain amount of protest activity is legal; it’s protected by the First Amendment. And we also believe in that.
What’s not legal is to block entrances or be violent, period. So blocking entrance to a house of worship, violence, these are not protected by the First Amendment. Protests within a reasonable distance, even loud protests, are protected by the First Amendment.
The cases I’m talking about are all illegal according to how you just defined it. They were within yards of schools where children were getting out of class, there were protests as people were going into synagogues. I’m talking about the protests in Crown Heights. There was a protest in Boro Park. There were protests in Flatbush, on Ocean Parkway, all areas of large Jewish populations. There was an event for people to buy real estate in Israel that had to be cancelled since there was a school nearby and protesters were threatening to come there, and the police made it clear that they would allow the protests to happen. Is this something that the Justice Department is getting involved in?
I don’t know without seeing the facts. People need to make a complaint. I just told you there’s activity that’s protected by the First Amendment, and there’s some that isn’t. I can’t give you a blanket answer to your question.
What about governmental discrimination by municipalities? You have a couple of active cases. You discussed this during an event recently; you didn’t go into detail, but I assume you were talking about New York regarding Forestburgh, and in New Jersey, you have Linden, where there are active complaints. How many of these types of complaints are there in any given year?
I don’t know the answer to that, but I can tell you there are several active complaints that we’re looking at now.
How do you decide which complaint is legit or not? For example, senior communities do not discriminate against youths even though young people are not allowed to live there. What about communities where people want to live quietly and not have large families, and t hen it slowly begins becoming Orthodox with large families? When do legitimate complaints end and illegal discrimination begin?
I can’t give you a blanket answer to that. We have United States housing laws that prevent discrimination, both in preventing entire groups of people from coming into a community and individuals from being barred from buying a piece of property through direct or indirect means. We’re investigating cases like that that are coming to our attention, of bigotry at the zoning level or bigotry at the sales level.
There are many communities involved in this kind of work, as you said. It’s a complex issue. You’ve seen, for example, a lot of backlash and protests in Texas against attempts in that state to build Muslim-majority communities. Those are also Americans seeking to live with like-minded people.
We have to carefully apply the law and make sure that while we’re respecting the First Amendment right of people to gather together and even live in the same area, we are also enforcing our Fair Housing Act and other federal housing laws that prevent discrimination in housing.
You just filed a complaint against a restaurant that refused services to Jewish patrons. Is this a common occurrence?
It’s not common because it’s obviously illegal, but it does happen.
Look, to be clear, our job at the Justice Department is not to take legal action on every single claim that comes along. We do look at claims, and then we determine jurisdictions, and then we look at cases that have the highest likelihood of success. Who is willing to step forward as a witness, how good are the facts, and is there documentary evidence? We also have to work with U.S. attorneys’ offices in parts of the country to be our local counsel or co-counsel in cases.
So there are a number of factors involved in whether we bring charges in a case. The fact that we don’t doesn’t mean that there isn’t merit to the case. It may be a resource constraint, a timing constraint, a lack of witnesses or evidence, etc.
A person who is discriminated against, should they go directly to the Justice Department or first try the local DA’s office or the State Attorney General?
All of the above. Understand that the first place where law enforcement occurs in the United States is at the local level. The Justice Department simply doesn’t have the resources or bandwidth to go and get involved in every single case, so we typically look at cases where the local response was insufficient or lacking entirely, or inadequate punishment was given for a criminal activity, or we need to make a point for some reason.
So definitely one should get involved at the local level and try to get help at that level.
Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
I was born in Punjab, India and came here to the United States as a small child. My father was a doctor and finished his medical training in the Bronx at the Albert Einstein Medical College. I grew up in rural North Carolina, went to high school there, went to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, worked in D.C. for a year at the Heritage Foundation, went to the University of Virginia for law school, and for the last 32 years I’ve been practicing law as a trial lawyer.
What would the Justice Department want my community to know about?
I would just say that this administration cares deeply about religious liberty, so there’s an antisemitism task force, and there’s also an anti-Christian task force.
I’m neither Christian nor Jewish. I’m a Sikh. And there have been shooting incidents against our temples as well. Those are also federal hate crimes. This is a religion-friendly Department of Justice and administration. We care deeply about the fundamental First Amendment rights of American citizens to gather together, pray together, and engage together as communities.
I think everyone’s seen that in action, and I’m proud to be part of that and to lead that Civil Rights Division.
My community certainly feels that there’s someone in charge now, as opposed to, as I said, the last four years when we felt adrift at sea.
I’m glad to hear that, and we will definitely keep that up as long as we’re here.
