How Growing Up in Smithfield Shaped Harmeet Dhillon

In 1975, when Harmeet Dhillon was around 6 years old, her family moved to Smithfield, a small town in rural Johnston County. A billboard touting the Ku Klux Klan greeted them. 

The white supremacist group was active in the area, which had a long history of racial violence and discrimination that continued through the 1970s and ‘80s. The dark-skinned Dhillons were from India and practiced Sikhism, a religion and philosophy founded in the Punjab region. Harmeet was born in India; her younger brother was born in the United Kingdom.

The family moved from New York, where Harmeet’s father, Tejpal Dhillon, was finishing his medical training in orthopedic surgery. He learned about Smithfield while on a family vacation at Disney World, and decided it would be the perfect place to raise children and establish an orthopedic surgical practice. 

The billboard, which urged newcomers to “Help Fight Communism & Integration” until 1977, didn’t bother Harmeet’s parents. (One version misspelled integration as “Intergration.”) 

“We knew what the KKK was,” Parminder Dhillon, Harmeet’s mother, told The Assembly. “We didn’t pay attention to it. We were coming there because we were needed.” 

Even though Harmeet Dhillon later said she was bullied for her ethnic and religious heritage, she shrugged it off and focused on her studies. 

Half a century later, the 57-year-old is in charge of enforcing the anti-discrimination laws that grew out of the racial animus Black people in Smithfield and elsewhere in the South faced. 

In April 2025, Dhillon was appointed as the assistant U.S. Attorney General over the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. In President Donald Trump’s second term, she has emerged as one of his most combative and loyal warriors, committed to defeating “woke” policies and stamping out diversity initiatives, known as DEI.

In her first year, she has transformed the division from one that once went after hate groups into one that prioritizes reverse-discrimination claims made by white men. She frequently attacks Trump’s critics on social media and Fox News. 

Late last year, she addressed conservative influencers on X. “[I]f you think you are ‘keeping the pressure on’ or ‘winning’ by spreading bullshit attacks on @realDonald Trump’s hand-picked cabinet, you are NOT,” she wrote. “You are earning money to spread misinformation. You are hoes.” 

Right-wing social media personality Mike Cernovich and others have pushed Dhillon as the perfect choice to replace Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general Trump fired in April. Several news outlets have reported that Dhillon could be promoted to the Justice Department’s third-ranking post, associate attorney general. Dhillon has not publicly lobbied for the top job and has supported interim U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche. 

But she has stayed busy suing 30 states and Washington, D.C. for unredacted voter rolls, bolstering Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and cheering the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 

During a phone interview in early April, Dhillon had fond memories of her time growing up in Smithfield and attending the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics, a public residential school in Durham for outstanding 11th- and 12th-grade students.

When asked about her childhood, she briefly spoke about her love of books, mentioning Madeline L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, and The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries. 

But her answers were often curt and filled with generalities. She soon grew impatient. “I’m not going to talk through my life history,” she said. 

Dhillon had no time for what she considered idle chatter. 

“I’m the Assistant Attorney General of the United States and you’re asking me how I came to like books,” she said. “I mean, come on.” 

‘We Were Different’

Smithfield, the Johnson County seat, is only 35 miles southeast of Raleigh, but in the 1970s and ‘80s it was more culturally connected to rural Eastern North Carolina than the more urban Triangle. The town had about 6,000 residents then. No one was really a stranger. 

“Everybody’s parents parented you,” said Julie Hopkins, who attended elementary school with Dhillon. “We all did the same things together.” 

Hopkins, who still lives in Smithfield, didn’t know Dhillon well but remembers she was extremely focused on school. “She was super smart,” she said. 

Parminder Dhillon, Harmeet’s mother, said from the time Harmeet was little, her head was in a book. Harmeet Dhillon can’t explain why she loved to read so much. She said it’s her God-given personality. 

Many in her extended family were medical doctors, and Dhillon aspired to be a brain surgeon. 

Moving to Smithfield was a culture shock, she told The Johnstonian in June 2024. She came from The Bronx, a smorgasbord of diverse cultures, to predominantly white and conservative Smithfield. 

“We were different; my dad and my brother wore turbans,” she said. “I had long hair, and I dressed funny. I didn’t have all the same designer stuff as my classmates. There was a lot of bullying and teasing.”

But she said that “obstacles are simply opportunities for you to grow and make yourself stronger.” 

The Dhillons were one of about 60 Indian families to migrate to North Carolina in the 1970s, and they quickly acclimated to Smithfield. They joined the Johnston County Country Club, where Tejpal won tennis trophies. They hosted cookouts for the medical community with a whole hog, coleslaw, hush puppies and biscuits, according to the obituary Harmeet wrote about her father, who died in Raleigh in 2024. 

The Dhillons were committed Republicans. They hosted fundraisers for the late U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, the five-term senator who opposed 1960s civil-rights legislation, harshly criticized LGBTQ people, and fought against expanded federal research to stop the AIDS crisis. Helms had built relationships with the Dhillons and other Indian-American leaders when he spoke out against the persecution of Sikhs in India. 

The Dhillons held parties for family and friends, where Punjabi, Urdu, and Hindi music was played. Harmeet and her brother, Mandeep, were taught to be proud of their ethnic and religious heritage. The Dhillons joined four other Indian-American families in establishing North Carolina’s first Sikh temple, the Sikh Gurudwara, in Durham in 1986.

Parminder Dhillon, who now lives in Raleigh, said she became dissatisfied with the public school system and moved her children to the private Ravenscroft School in suburban North Raleigh. While Mandeep finished at Ravenscroft, Harmeet left for the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, where she graduated at age 16 in 1985. 

All Harmeet Dhillon will say about her time at Ravenscroft and the Science and Mathematics schools is that she had a wonderful educational experience and made some good friends. The Assembly reached out to numerous former classmates. Most did not respond. Two declined to be interviewed; one former roommate initially agreed to an interview but declined after Dhillon advised her not to cooperate. 

The Dartmouth Years

Dhillon arrived at Dartmouth College, the Ivy League university in New Hampshire, in the fall of 1985. At first, she told podcaster and lawyer M.C. Sungaila in 2022, she felt all alone. 

In North Carolina, “Everyone said sir and ma’am,” Dhillon said. “Everybody knew their hierarchy in the social culture.” 

As she was moving into an all-girls dorm with boxes in her arm, someone let the door slam in her face. “I thought that was very different and that would never happen in North Carolina,” she said. She wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper describing her “very bad first experience” in New Hampshire. 

But Dartmouth proved to be the perfect place for a burgeoning conservative. In the 1980s and ‘90s, it was an incubator for many influential right-wing thinkers. That includes Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza, who made the conspiracy-fueled film 2000 Mules. 

Dhillon sharpened her rhetorical knives. In her freshman year, she began writing for The Dartmouth Review, the newspaper known for its sometimes savage satirical attacks on traditionally liberal political values. She soon rose to editor-in-chief. One of her most provocative actions was approving an article attacking the college’s president, who was Jewish, with a headline invoking a Nazi slogan. In The New York Times, she railed against Dartmouth’s administration, saying it was oppressive to conservative students and argued that the article simply sought to compare “liberal fascism” with other forms of fascism. 

In 1988, the newspaper castigated William Cole, a Black music professor, for how he conducted his classes. Tensions boiled, escalating into a confrontation between Cole and three white writers for the Review. Dartmouth officials suspended the students, and they successfully sued the school. 

That incident solidified Dhillon’s decision to go into law. 

“I was blown away by the fact that 19- and 20-year-olds could sue an Ivy League institution,” she told the Portia Project podcast. “We won the reinstatement of our colleagues and their suspensions were expunged. The federal court ordered them reinstated. That changed my course in life from medicine, which everybody I knew was doing, to law, which in my community in the Sikh, immigrants from India, law is not an honored profession. It’s a third-rate profession.”

After graduating from Dartmouth, Dhillon got married and the couple moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked as an editor for the Heritage Foundation. She said her husband was abusive and forbade her from going to law school. She eventually divorced him and attended law school at the University of Virginia, graduating in 1993. (Dhillon married twice more. Her second marriage ended around 2004. In 2011, she married Sarvjit Singh Randhawa, who died in 2024.) 

Dhillon moved to California, where she quickly established herself in both the legal and political circles. She worked at a big law firm before founding the Dhillon Law Firm Group and later the Center for American Liberty, where she pursued cases involving free speech, civil rights, and election law. Dhillon brought legal challenges against the University of California at Berkeley over its free speech policies and sued several states over stay-at-home policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But while she fought hard in the courtrooms, she also tempered her firebrand conservative reputation. For three years, she served on the board of the Northern California chapter of the ACLU and represented Sikhs and other South Asians claiming discrimination in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. That led some Republicans to believe she wasn’t conservative enough. The backlash only increased after she made a $250 contribution to Kamala Harris when she was running for district attorney for San Francisco in 2003. 

In 2008, Dhillon ran for the California State Assembly and lost with 17% of the vote; four years later, she unsuccessfully ran for California State Senate. 

When she made a bid for vice chairman of the state GOP in 2013, the California Republican Assembly, a conservative group, accused her of being a Bay Area liberal who “simply doesn’t represent our values.” 

She won that race, and went on to work for the Republican National Committee for California. 

She said she wanted to confound stereotypes about Republicans by proudly embracing her ethnic and religious identity, even as some lambasted her for not being Christian. 

Lessons From Smithfield

In the years since, Dhillon has dived deep into MAGA world. It is clearly her home now, and she has the receipts to prove it. 

She served as legal adviser for Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. When Trump was alleging massive election fraud without any providing evidence, Dhillon said she hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would rule to guarantee Trump’s victory. 

Dhillon also represented Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News commentator, in a 2023 sex discrimination lawsuit filed by former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg. Fox News settled the lawsuit for $12 million. 

She has not forgotten the lessons of her youth. That has come in handy when the MAGA world has criticized her heritage. 

In early 2023, she challenged incumbent Ronna McDaniel for chair of the Republican National Committee, but lost after a whisper campaign against her religion. According to the San Francisco Standard, an insider sent an email saying Dhillon lacked a “Judeo-Christian worldview.” She responded as she did when she was bullied back in Smithfield as a child, barely bristling. 

“I’m a big girl,” she said. “Racism is a factor throughout all societies, and I don’t have a victim mentality. There’s always going to be haters in the world. But as my mom would say, throw a stone at every barking dog, and you’ll never reach your destination.”

The next year, she received backlash when she recited a Sikh prayer at the 2024 Republican National Convention, with one social-media influencer calling the prayer “witchcraft” and a “lovely decorated word salad for ‘Hail Satan.’” 

That has not deterred her from fulfilling what she believes is Trump’s agenda; she has said Trump’s views are her views. 

In Trump’s second term, Dhillon has overseen a division that has seen 76% of its leadership staff depart in the last year, far more than the 33% across the entire Justice Department. She has rescinded consent decrees with law-enforcement agencies with a history of police brutality, discontinued discrimination investigations, and halted or dismissed discrimination lawsuits filed during the previous administration. 

She has aggressively defended her actions, saying that the Civil Rights Division had become too politicized in previous Democratic administrations and had long abandoned its role in defending the rights of all. Instead, she has argued, the division had invested in woke policies and preferential treatment. She’s aligned herself with Trump’s assessment that civil-rights protections led to white people “being very badly treated.” 

According to The Atlantic, one of her first actions was to terminate a 2023 settlement to install a functioning sanitation system in poor and predominantly Black Lowndes County, Alabama. Dhillon said the termination complied with Trump’s executive order seeking to eliminate any DEI policy. 

Under her leadership, Dhillon’s Civil Rights Division has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C. to obtain unredacted voter rolls in the belief they contain thousands of ineligible voters. Critics have assailed the lawsuits, saying the Justice Department would possibly purge eligible voters. 

These days, Dhillon almost appears to embrace the backlash. She doesn’t care what people think of her, even as her profile in the Trump world gets brighter. The criticism is her badge of honor. 

The base of that steel spine was created 50 years ago in Smithfield. 

“There were Klan signs on the highway where I grew up,” she told Dartmouth’s alumni magazine. “I’m used to being an outsider.”