SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Long before Harmeet Dhillon became the leader of the legal fight against California's stay-at-home order, she was a new elementary school student in North Carolina uncomfortable because she didn't know the Christian prayer her classmates recited every morning.
She told her mother, who had studied the Constitution for her citizenship test after the Sikh family emigrated to the United States from India.
Her mother spoke to the principal about the legality of having public school students reciting a prayer. The school changed its policy, Dhillon said.
That moment was her initial lesson in the First Amendment that four decades later would be one of the underpinnings for more than a dozen lawsuits she helped to file over