The Department of Justice has formally stood up a dedicated Second Amendment Section inside its Civil Rights Division, and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has spent the past week explaining, in her own words, how that section intends to spend its resources. This is the fulfillment of something I have been arguing for since the start of this administration: personnel is policy, and until the right people were confirmed into the right offices, nothing structural was going to change for the right to keep and bear arms. Now the people are in place, and we are getting a first look at how they intend to sequence the fight.
Personnel Is Policy, Applied
Earlier this year I explained that meaningful progress for the Second Amendment inside the executive branch would be effectively impossible until two confirmations were complete: Solicitor General D. John Sauer and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon. Both are now confirmed and installed, and the practical consequence is visible. Dhillon runs the Civil Rights Division, the component of the Justice Department that now houses the new Second Amendment Section, and she has personally argued in federal court on behalf of gun owners. That is not something the prior Civil Rights Division would ever have done. The trend is our friend, even where I disagree with individual tactical choices along the way.
A Dedicated Second Amendment Section
The creation of a formal Second Amendment Section within the Civil Rights Division is a structural commitment, not a talking point. Dhillon has been candid in recent public remarks that the Division cannot litigate every bad gun law simultaneously, so it is proceeding in a defined sequence. In her telling, the low-hanging fruit comes first: making sure law-abiding citizens who apply for carry permits actually receive them promptly, without the kind of bureaucratic slow-walking that functions as a de facto denial. From there the Division moves to defending firearms that the Supreme Court has already recognized as presumptively lawful — semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 chief among them — against states that ban them outright. High-cost permitting schemes, designed to price citizens out of a constitutional right through sheer expense, come after that.
I take her point that a carry permit issued in the District of Columbia is nearly worthless if the holder cannot use it on the Metro, in a federal building, or across a state line. A right that exists on paper but cannot be exercised anywhere useful is not much of a right at all.
Sequencing, and the Take Care Clause
The sequencing question matters because it explains why the Division is, for now, going after state gun-control regimes while largely leaving existing federal statutes alone. Article II of the Constitution imposes on the President the obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” As an institutional matter, the Justice Department defends federal law the overwhelming majority of the time, switching sides only in unusual circumstances. That constraint does not apply to state law, where the federal government can appear as plaintiff or amicus on the side of the challengers.
That framework explains what we are actually watching play out in the courts right now. Dhillon personally argued for the United States before the Seventh Circuit in Barnett v. Raoul, defending gun owners against Illinois’s ban on AR-15s and other semiautomatic rifles, argued September 22, 2025, and still awaiting decision. The Civil Rights Division also filed an amicus brief supporting the challengers in Cheeseman v. Platkin, New Jersey’s parallel assault-weapon and magazine-capacity case, ahead of en banc argument in that case in October 2025. Neither case has been decided. But the fact that the United States is now weighing in on the side of gun owners, in states from Illinois to New Jersey to California to Hawaii to New York, is itself the news.
The Exodus, and Why It Is a Feature
The left-leaning press has spent considerable ink on the hundreds of career lawyers who have left the Civil Rights Division since Dhillon took over, framing it as an institutional crisis. Dhillon has been unapologetic in response, describing a Division that for decades pursued a narrow set of favored causes and is now expected to protect the civil rights of all Americans, including the right to keep and bear arms. I see the departures as confirmation of the same thesis that got us here: personnel is policy. Lawyers unwilling to defend the Second Amendment as a civil right were never going to be assets to a Division now tasked with doing exactly that. Their exit clears the way for attorneys who will.
None of this means the administration has gotten everything right, and I will continue to flag the places where it has not. But a dedicated Second Amendment Section, run by confirmed officials with a public, sequenced litigation strategy, is a structural gain worth recognizing plainly.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.