Authored by Brad Jones via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Harmeet Dhillon’s decision to step down as the CEO of the Center of American Liberty to accept her new role as an assistant attorney general is one of mixed emotions, but it’s the right move, she says.
President Donald Trump chose Dhillon, who is known for championing parental rights, to lead the civil rights division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi. She was confirmed on April 3.
“Our priorities are the president’s priorities,” Dhillon told The Epoch Times. “You’re not going to see any sunlight between us and the White House on their policy prerogatives.”
Trump’s executive orders that aim to protect women’s and girls’ rights in sports and target gender ideology, anti-Semitism, and “unconstitutional and discriminatory behavior at America’s top institutions of higher learning” indicate a few focal points for the civil rights division, she said.
“Those are our top civil rights priorities, and I don’t think anyone will be surprised to learn that,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I was selected for this role because of the background in civil rights on a number of aligned issues that we have done at the Center for American Liberty … as well as my private practice and the Dhillon Law Group.”
The DOJ’s civil rights division is the nation’s primary defender of religious liberties, which are protected by the First Amendment and many federal statutes, “so you can expect that to be a priority of this administration,” she said.
With more than 400 attorneys, 600 employees in the DOJ’s civil rights division, and a heavy backlog of work, Dhillon said she’s getting up to speed on the division’s activities and beginning new investigations and initiatives.
“Every few minutes, something different crosses my desk,” she said, on her seventh day on the job.
While people on social media are asking her to investigate a wide range of issues, Dhillon said it will take time.
“I can’t put the cart before the horse. We have to do our investigations in due order,” she said. “As lawyers, we need to get our facts straight and go through a particular process before we file lawsuits, but I can assure you that the civil rights division under Bondi’s leadership, and under President Trump’s leadership is going to be extremely active on the issues that Americans care about.”
And those issues, she said, are the ones the president has spoken about on the campaign trail and in the Oval Office.
“Once we get started with some of these lawsuits becoming public and investigations—having some teeth into them—I think people are going to see those results to a much greater degree than ever in a Republican administration,” she said.
Dhillon recently launched a new account on social media platform X, where people can follow her official government posts.
‘Bittersweet’ Sentiments
When she accepted the nomination, she knew it would mean stepping down as CEO of the Center for American Liberty, which she founded in 2018.
“It’s bittersweet,” she said. “I’m sad about moving on because it was a dream of mine,” she said.
But she is confident in her colleague Mark Trammell’s ability to take the reins. Trammell is the former executive director.
Dhillon said she started the organization because she saw conservative organizations “doing little slices of civil rights work in very narrow areas, but nobody comprehensively taking on the rights of American citizens who are suffering from novel forms of discrimination or traditional forms of discrimination.”
The center has defended the rights of free speech for students on campus and filed more lawsuits during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, mainly on the grounds of religious freedom, than any other organization, and is well-known for representing young people who had undergone medical and hormonal treatments as teens in attempts to change their gender, which they are now trying to reverse; they’re known as detransitioners.
“We have led the nation in standing up for the rights of young women to hold their physicians and medical institutions accountable for misleading them about the gender transition industry and the harm that it does to so many thousands of American young women and men as well,” Dhillon said.
A New Role
When asked if she would investigate complaints from parents of gender dysphoric children who say they’ve faced the threat of having a child taken from their custody for refusing to call the child by opposite sex or preferred pronouns, Dhillon said, “Center for American Liberty took on several cases like that and that should be a clue.”
“I find it to be a very troubling trend,” she said. “It is absolutely a violation of Supreme Court jurisprudence, as well as natural law and civil rights law, for any state to usurp parental rights the way that we have seen.”
Coercing parents to use preferred pronouns as a condition of enjoying their natural rights as parents is a violation of the First Amendment, due process, and equal protection, she said.
Dhillon said she is also concerned about states that prohibit foster parents from helping orphaned children or troubled youth because they refuse to align with certain viewpoints on gender.
Read more here…
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