In the middle of January, anti-ICE protesters disrupted Sunday worship at Cities Church in St Paul, Minnesota. The video went viral within hours, and Harmeet K Dhillon got to work almost as quickly.

“Infuriating conduct,” she posted to X, “demonic and godless behavior” that could be “facially illegal”. As tweets go this is fairly banal, but Dhillon is more than a mere poster. She leads the civil rights unit at the Department of Justice, and she wanted a reckoning.

The next day she let X know the DoJ would pursue federal charges against the protesters. Then she gave an interview to the right-wing influencer Benny Johnson and threatened legal action against Don Lemon, a well-known reporter and former CNN anchor who covered the incident. Lemon went into the church and began “‘committing journalism,’ as if that’s sort of a shield from being a part, an embedded part, of a criminal conspiracy”, she told Johnson, who once plagiarised himself out of two jobs in media. But Dhillon wasn’t satisfied with threats alone.

Three days after the protest, she boosted a post from the online prediction platform Polymarket, which said there was a 36 percent chance the DoJ would charge Lemon. On January 29, that’s exactly what happened. Federal agents arrested Lemon, the independent journalist Georgia Fort and seven others in connection with the protest.

Lemon pleaded not guilty in February, and legal analysts say the government’s case has no merit. For Dhillon, though, the outcome is nearly irrelevant. Even if the DoJ fails, she has succeeded – at persecuting a government critic while elevating herself.

In the predominantly white, male world of the Trump administration, Dhillon, a Sikh woman of Indian descent, would stand out no matter what she did, but she likes being one of a kind. She is loud, she is pugnacious, and she never stops posting. (“You are hoes,” she told her enemies last December.) She knits elaborate sweaters. She leverages an obscure position for personal glory, and the price may be the First Amendment.

Dhillon’s rise from private legal practice to White House bulldog owes much to her attitude and a........

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