Harmeet Dhillon is going to WAR against DEI

A major philosophical shift is under way inside the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division — and much of it is thanks to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.

Dhillon tells BlazeTV hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman on “Rufo & Lomez” how she’s moving the agency away from diversity, equity, and inclusion-driven enforcement and toward a return to colorblind equality under the law.

“You’re bringing a totally different theory of civil rights law to the Department of Justice,” Rufo tells Dhillon. “This can’t be easy.”

“It is a very daunting task and, frankly, when I raised my hand in response to the president’s request to do this job, I knew it was going to be one of the more difficult jobs here in the DOJ because historically the Civil Rights Division has been a place that doesn’t really change very much from administration to administration,” Dhillon says.

The reason, Dhillon explains, is that “the lawyers who choose to make their careers doing civil rights work typically, historically, have been from a leftist perspective.”

“And that isn’t necessarily bad. I mean, there was a point in time in our country when we passed a lot of these civil rights laws in the 1960s, where we had rampant discrimination against African-Americans and other people and even against women to a degree,” she tells Rufo and Lomez.

“But way past the time that many of these historical ills have been corrected by our society, with or without the intervention of the Civil Rights Division, people have viewed it as their mission to continue to push the boundaries further and further out to the left,” she says.

This has posed one of the biggest issues for Dhillon in her war against DEI.

“The truism from the Reagan era is that personnel is policy. And so one of the biggest challenges we had here was, how are we going to implement the president’s agenda with personnel who don’t want to do that,” she explains.

“I actually had … a relatively smooth transition into our mission because early on … I issued memos to all the different sections here in the Civil Rights Division … letting them know that we are going to be changing our focus here to implementing the president’s agenda, consistent with the civil rights statutes in the Constitution,” she continues.

“And that simple step, sometimes just one or two paragraphs of a memo to a few dozen lawyers, caused more than half of them to quit right away,” she adds.

Then, when an early retirement program at the DOJ was implemented, another several dozen took advantage of the program and quit.

“We were down about two-thirds of the manpower here in the Civil Rights Division. And so, then the challenge became how to do the big job of rightsizing our civil rights agenda and making it consistent with the president’s agenda,” she explains.

While she admits that it was difficult at the outset, she’s “happy to say that we’ve gotten past all of that.”

“We’ve hired a bunch of great people, young and old, here in the Civil Rights Division, who are very willing to work with us in doing the work that you’ve seen in the headlines,” she adds.

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