Harmeet Dhillon

Harmeet Kaur Dhillon (born 1969) is an American lawyer and Republican Party official. She is the former vice chairwoman of the California Republican Party, and a National Committeewoman of the Republican National Committee for California. She is the founder of a law practice called Dhillon Law Group Inc. In 2018, she helped launch the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Center for American Liberty, which does legal work related to civil liberties. She is a regular guest on Fox News. During the coronavirus pandemic, she filed numerous unsuccessful lawsuits to halt the implementation of stay-at-home-orders and other restrictions. She criticized face masks requirements, called for the re-opening of the economy, and opposed mail in voting. In the January 2023 election, Dhillon unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Ronna McDaniel as chairperson of the Republican National Committee. Early life and education Dhillon was born in Chandigarh, India to a Punjabi Sikh family in 1969. Her family moved to the United States when she was a child so that her father could pursue a career as an orthopedic surgeon. Her family eventually settled in Smithfield, North Carolina. After finishing high school at age 16, she attended Dartmouth College. She became a writer and eventually editor-in-chief at The Dartmouth Review. During her tenure at The Review, a satirical column criticizing the school's President and the policies of his administration generated controversy. In the column, President James O. Freedman, who was Jewish, was likened to Adolf Hitler due to the alleged discriminatory policies of his administration against conservatives. These policies were referred to by the column as a “holocaust” and the “Final Solution to the Conservative Problem”. The column also characterized conservatives at Dartmouth as being “deported in cattle cars in the night”. Dhillion claimed that the column sought to draw parallels between so-called “liberal fascism” and fascism. She stated that there was no intention to minimize the horrors of the Holocaust, rather the column sought to demonstrate the mistreatment that conservative students faced under President Freedman's administration. After graduating from Dartmouth, she attended law school, graduating from the University of Virginia School of Law where she was on the editorial board of the Virginia Law Review. After law school, she clerked for Judge Paul Victor Niemeyer of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.