Harmeet Dhillon,  confirmed on April 3, 2025, as President Donald Trump's nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights, prepares for her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on Feb. 26, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The Senate cleared two more of President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice nominees Thursday, installing another attorney who defended Trump last year and a new lead on civil rights who has drawn intense criticism from advocacy groups.

The Senate confirmed California lawyer Harmeet Dhillon in a 52-45 vote to the role of assistant attorney general, heading up the agency’s Civil Rights Division, one of the largest at Justice. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to oppose the nomination.

Dhillon, a Trump legal adviser and the managing partner at Dhillon Law Group in San Francisco, specializes in commercial litigation, employment law, First Amendment rights and election law matters, according to the biography on her firm’s website.

Dhillon is also the CEO and founder of the Center for American Liberty, which states its mission as “defending the civil liberties of Americans left behind by civil rights legacy organizations.”

Dhillon previously sat on the ACLU Northern California board and defended members of the Sikh community, to which her family belongs, from attacks after 9/11, according to reporting from San Francisco-based KQED-FM.

But Dhillon also has a trail of controversies, including repeatedly denying the 2020 presidential election results and fueling conspiracies following the 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat.

Civil rights advocates also point to her recent legal work challenging voting and transgender rights.

“She’s not out there to protect the rights of all of us, and that’s what her record has demonstrated,” Lena Zwarensteyn, of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told States Newsroom Thursday.

In an eight-page letter to senators, led by the Leadership Conference and signed by dozens of advocacy groups, the coalition wrote Dhillon has “relentlessly tried to limit access to the ballot box” and “denied, diminished and tried to erase” the existence of transgender youth.

States Newsroom reached out to the White House for comment.

Former Missouri AG elevated

The Senate also confirmed in a party-line vote, 52-45, Dean Sauer, former Missouri solicitor general and Trump’s defense lawyer, to lead government litigation.

After representing Trump’s presidential immunity argument before the U.S. Supreme Court last year, Sauer will now argue before the high bench on the DOJ’s behalf.

Sauer made headlines in January 2024 when he suggested to a three-judge panel for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that a president might be shielded by presidential immunity for ordering SEAL Team Six to assassinate a rival.