BARD - Harmeet Dhillon on Texas Redistricting, Campus DEI Crackdowns and Life Inside DOJ

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**SPEAKER_3** (1:05)
This is Beyond A Reasonable Doubt with your hosts, Mark Geragos and Gary Smith.

**Mark Geragos** (1:14)
I could not be more thrilled than to have my friend, ex-co-counsel, now currently head of, what are you, what's your official title?

**Harmeet Dhillon** (1:27)
I'm the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the United States Department of Justice.

**Mark Geragos** (1:31)
And your name is Harmeet Dhillon, and you're coming off quite a week, aren't you, Harmeet?

**Harmeet Dhillon** (1:37)
It's been a big week at the DOJ in my division, but particularly on election law issues, but a few other issues as well. Yeah, it's been pretty busy.

**Mark Geragos** (1:45)
Well, let's start. I thought of you yesterday because I saw the Supreme Court ruled six to three in the Texas case. Reverse? Well, no. Affirming the two-to-one decision out of the Fifth Circuit. I'm sorry.

**Harmeet Dhillon** (2:13)
Not the Fifth Circuit. So in redistricting cases.

**Mark Geragos** (2:17)
I have so screwed up the appellate history. I'll let you say it then.

**Harmeet Dhillon** (2:22)
Okay. So redistricting cases are unusual, unlike the work that we usually do where we go to the district court and then you appeal it to the court of appeals and then you go to the Supreme Court and they may hear it. There's only two levels of review in a redistricting case. So anytime there's a case involving a challenge to a map drawn by a state, it goes before a three-judge panel, which is a very rare proceeding, and that was in the, I believe, Western District of Texas. A three-judge panel heard this challenge to Texas's legislative redistricting mid-decade, and then that gets appealed directly to the Supreme Court. So the Fifth Circuit actually doesn't have a direct state of the law. And so, although one of the judges on the three-judge panel was a Fifth Circuit judge, Judge Jerry Smith.

**Mark Geragos** (3:13)
Right, and so it was two to one out of that three-judge panel, even though it was two district, one circuit, correct?

**Harmeet Dhillon** (3:23)
It was two to one wrong, and then the Supreme Court issued an injunction on that ruling, which itself enjoined the new maps from going into effect for the 2026 election. And then the court heard argument on it, and the court ruled yesterday six to three with a couple of different opinions that the map could go forward for the 2026 election. So that was a victory for the redistricting, which my team had supported in the Supreme Court with an amicus brief. And as you know, I'm prominently mentioned in the lower court proceedings as well.

**Mark Geragos** (4:00)
Well, you mentioned it first, so I'm gonna follow up with it. Prominently mentioned in the lower court proceedings, there was a, would you call it a judicial slam or a bench slap in the lower court proceedings?

**Harmeet Dhillon** (4:16)
I'll call it a smear. It was a completely inaccurate framing. And the whole majority opinion, I mean, we can get into it, was extremely unusual in its tone and in its content where they left behind the dissenting judge, didn't show it to him. And so he himself issued his dissent two days later, which is extremely unusual.
The whole package comes forward at once.

**Mark Geragos** (4:44)
Yeah, I was gonna say, I can't remember, maybe you can because I know I don't do redistricting litigation, but I don't remember any court ruling that I've read in recent history, where the majority opinion comes out, kind of slams DOJ, and then two days later, the dissent comes out. I mean, I don't even remember that happening, do you?

**Harmeet Dhillon** (5:11)
I don't remember it either. And it is a breach of protocol. Normally, federal judges, they may disagree. I mean, I clerked in a federal court of appeals in the Fourth Circuit. They may disagree with each other, but they're usually very courteous to one another, respectful of one another. And what happened here was, well, there are a lot of factors going on here. First of all, there's an election coming up. And so the majority judges use that as an excuse for rushing out their opinion, but they didn't really rush it. I mean, there was a preliminary, there was a complaint filed, and then there was a motion for a preliminary injunction.