Billionaire Nicole Shanahan, who ran for vice president with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in the 2024 presidential election, congratulated U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who was chosen by President Donald Trump to lead the Department of Justice’s civil rights division.
Shanahan called the pick “a brilliant move by President Trump,” and described Dhillon as “a battle-tested constitutional lawyer and a fierce defender of parental rights—no one is more qualified to protect the torch of liberty.”
As seen below, on Shanahan’s podcast, Dhillon said many of the top higher education institutions in the country are still using DEI and affirmative action practices when it comes to admissions, but under a different name.
Nominating @AAGDhillon to lead the DOJ’s civil rights division was a brilliant move by President Trump. She’s a battle-tested constitutional lawyer and a fierce defender of parental rights—no one is more qualified to protect the torch of liberty. pic.twitter.com/zUR83aUKrk
— Nicole Shanahan (@NicoleShanahan) May 10, 2025
Dhillon (a graduate of Dartmouth and the University of Virginia Law School) said her office has sent letters to the top 50 higher education institutions “and we’re demanding data from them.”
She added: “whenever an institution, any institution, takes a grant from the federal government, they pledge to follow the law…ultimately following the law is a requirement of getting federal funding, and they’re simply not following the law.”
Prior to working with the Trump administration, Dhillon was vice chair of the California Republican Party, the former National Committeewoman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) for California, and a member of the ACLU.
In 2013, the SFGate reported that Dhillon “doesn’t focus on the divisive social issues that have alienated the GOP from Californians.”
SFGate also reported then that “Dhillon said she contributed $250 to Harris in her 2003 San Francisco district attorney race against Democrat Terence Hallinan – not $250 to Harris’ attorney general’s campaign in 2010, as critics allege – because Harris was ‘the more conservative candidate. Republicans in San Francisco often support the lesser of two evils.’”
Dhillon has since focused on divisive social issues: during the Covid pandemic, she filed numerous lawsuits to fight stay-at-home-orders, criticized face mask requirements, and opposed mail-in voting.
When Dhillon was nominated in March by Trump, a letter from more than 75 national organizations including the ACLU, NAACP, AFL-CIO, and The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights coalition, was sent to the Senate to voice their collective opposition to Dhillon’s nomination. The letter argued: “Throughout her career, Ms. Dhillon has threatened the very civil rights of many communities who the Civil Rights Division was created to defend.”