U.S. Civil Rights chief meets respectful reception at FSU amid ICE turmoil • Florida Phoenix

With opposition to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tactics rising over the past month, a visit by an official from the Trump administration on a major college campus in this political environment could results in major protests.

Florida State University in Tallahassee is not one of those campuses.

Instead, a well-behaved crowd gathered this week to hear from Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general overseeing the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

The only manifestation of dissent from the crowd came from the last member of the public to ask a question Thursday night.

“Do you think that free-speech rights completely override facts and truth? And the second part is: We all know Donald Trump did lose the 2020 election, but nevertheless he said that he didn’t and that the election was stolen and he carried out various activities that were obviously illegal and unconstitutional,” said Edmund Myers — who was stopped at that point by event moderator Ryan Owens, director of the FSU Institute for Governance and Civics.

It’s one of a number of organizations the Legislature has established under Gov. DeSantis and the GOP-controlled Legislature at Florida universities to advance “conscience, economic, constitutional, and educational liberty,” as the institute’s website puts it.

“I’m going to reject the very tendentious framing of that speech/question,” Dhillon responded, before bemoaning what she said was the death of free speech in the United Kingdom and Europe and hailing the freedom of expression she said still exists in the United States.

“I have very close friends who disagree with the administration’s position on Minnesota; they reach out to me, and I hear them,” she said, referring to ICE’s aggressive confrontations with protesters that have resulted in the loss of two lives there last month. “I think that is a hallmark of an egalitarian society to exchange different and sometime controversial views.”

Dhillon was a conservative civil rights attorney in ultra-progressive San Francisco for more than two decades before Trump appointed her last year to head the Civil Rights Division. During her time in San Francisco, she became chair of the local GOP, and in 2008 was elected vice-chair of the California Republican Party. She later served as a member of the Republican National Committee representing California, and in 2023 lost a bid to Ronna McDaniel to lead the Republican National Committee.

The Civil Rights Division enforces federal laws protecting against discrimination based on race, sex, disability, religion, and national origin. When Dhillon arrived last year, she said, she found many officials in the office were “deeply wedded” to a political perspective that she was not aligned with.

“They never saw a police misconduct complaint that they didn’t agree with,” she said. “They never thought that white people or men were protected by civil rights laws. So, the good news is, half of those people quit the first week that I was there. So, they self-deported.

“The big challenge is actually hiring good people. So, my legacy is I would like to hire enough good people who want to make their careers doing civil rights work the right way, looking at it objectively for all Americans, and leave that as a legacy.”

Charging ICE protestors in Minnesota

On Friday, former CNN host-turned independent reporter Don Lemon was  arraigned in federal court in Minnesota along with four other defendants for their alleged roles in disrupting a service at a church in St. Paul, where an ICE official was a pastor, last month. Lemon pleaded not guilty.

The DOJ has accused them of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994, signed by former President Bill Clinton, which makes it a federal crime to physically obstruct entry to clinics offering reproductive health services. The law extends protections to people seeking to enter a house of worship “to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom.”

Protesters interrupted the service at Cities Church on Jan. 18 by chanting “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good,” referring to the 37-year-old mother of three fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis last month.

Dhillon told the audience it was “clear” from videos streamed before the incident that the event “was planned days in advance.”

“The evidence is all out there to see,” she said. “It was all out there on the Sunday that this occurred. The attorney general [Pam Bondi] texted me. I texted her. We saw this unfold in real time. The evidence is out there, put [there] by the participants. We’ve indicted nine people so far, and I believe that there are as many as 40 people involved in the destruction of this church event. And we’re looking for the rest of them and hope to bring them to justice.”

The case vs U.S. universities

Also on Friday, the Civil Rights Division filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, accusing the Ivy League institution of unlawfully withholding from the administration admissions data deemed necessary to determine whether Harvard discriminated against white admissions applicants.

The Trump administration has aggressively and unprecedentedly gone after U.S. universities in its first year back in office for failing to combat antisemitism. Later, the administration moved to freeze federal research grants to universities accused of violating anti-discrimination laws in admissions.

Dhillon defended those actions, arguing the amount of money those universities receive is “unfathomable” and that they need to be held accountable.

“What we found is, the user experience of tens of millions of Americans is, you don’t have a fair shot to be hired as faculty if you’re a conservative or white or male,” she said. “And if you’re simply Asian or white you are discriminated in admissions. These are the facts that have been found by federal courts. And so, we’re going to right that because, as I said, this DOJ wants to be color blind.”

Following the appearance, Myers told a Phoenix reporter he was frustrated he wasn’t able to complete what he wanted to say to Dhillon.

“What I was going to say was, how does she square [working in Trump’s Justice Department] with the fact that she took an oath to protect the Constitution when she became assistant attorney general. How can she square this oath with supporting this president?”

When asked how he believed the president was acting against the Constitution, Myers mentioned the events leading to and following the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “And his sycophants have supported him without any real appreciation of the facts and the truth, justice, or civil rights,” he said.