At the 2026 NRA Annual Meetings in Houston, the Department of Justice confirmed a personnel reform that sounds administrative, but is actually structural: attorneys hired into the new Second Amendment Rights Unit will be permitted to work out of their local U.S. Attorney’s offices rather than relocate to Washington, D.C. The change eliminates a major hurdle that has made it harder to hire attorneys sympathetic to President Trump’s agenda, including pro-Second Amendment lawyers.
The Announcement
Associate Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon described the new policy during a presentation at the 155th NRA Annual Meetings, held April 16–19 in Houston, Texas. Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division, signaled that the new Second Amendment Rights Section — launched December 4, 2025, and currently led by Acting Chief Andrew Darlington — would recruit nationally and allow remote work through the federal U.S. Attorney office network.
To illustrate how the new policy would work, a qualified attorney in Houston, Tampa Bay, or Salt Lake City can now apply to work for the Second Amendment Unit at DOJ, be hired into the Civil Rights Division, and perform that work from their nearest U.S. Attorney’s office. The lawyer does not have to sell a home, move a family, or take children out of school to serve in a federal civil rights role.
Why D.C. Location Has Been a Structural Filter
The requirement to live and work inside the Beltway has long functioned as an invisible screen on the federal hiring pool — particularly for the Civil Rights Division. The economics alone can be prohibitive. A lawyer leaving a private-sector practice in a mid-sized red-state city typically takes a significant pay cut to join DOJ. Layer on Washington-area housing costs, spousal employment disruption, and school transitions, and the move is professionally and personally untenable for many highly-qualified mid-career attorneys.
The geographic concentration compounds the effect. The D.C. metro — the District itself, suburban Maryland, and Northern Virginia — votes heavily Democratic in every federal cycle. The resident talent pool from which DOJ has historically drawn skews decisively in one political direction, and a division tasked with civil rights litigation has tended to reflect the ideological preferences of the region that supplies its applicants. According to reports, roughly 75 percent of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division’s then-existing career staff departed after the elevation of Dhillon to run that division.
A lawyer who believes the Second Amendment is a genuine individual right in need of vigorous federal enforcement is statistically more likely to live in a red state. Requiring a lawyer to relocate to the Beltway where the political and professional culture is openly hostile to that view has been a powerful — if unstated — disqualifier.
Inside the Second Amendment Rights Unit
The Second Amendment Rights Section is a young and deliberately ambitious unit. Created inside the Civil Rights Division in December 2025, it marks the first time in the division’s history that a standing unit has been tasked with affirmatively litigating on behalf of gun owners vindicating their fundamental right to bear arms. The unit has already filed lawsuits against local governments, including an action against Los Angeles County over concealed carry permit processing delays, and Dhillon has telegraphed additional litigation targeting Virginia’s recently-enacted gun control measures. It has also filed amicus briefs in high-profile fights over so-called “assault weapon” bans in federal appeals courts.
Personnel Is Policy
The adage that personnel is policy is nowhere more true than at DOJ, where line attorneys exercise enormous discretion over which cases are filed, how they are briefed, and which arguments are pressed. A section staffed with lawyers drawn from states where the Second Amendment is taken seriously as a matter of ordinary constitutional practice will produce different briefs, different theories, and different results than a section staffed exclusively from the politically deep-blue D.C. suburbs.
There is also a retention dimension. Attorneys who can remain embedded in their home legal communities — continuing to practice alongside state bars, judges, and colleagues who share their constitutional commitments — are measurably more likely to stay in federal service long enough to build institutional expertise. The Second Amendment Rights Section will need that continuity if it is to establish a durable litigation footprint.
Whether the reform produces the results Dhillon and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche envision depends on execution: how quickly the division can vet and onboard candidates, whether Congress sustains the division’s funding, and whether the lower courts apply the Supreme Court’s Bruen with the rigor the Constitution requires. But as a management move, it is a brilliant and overdue step — a federal agency actively widening the geographic and ideological pool from which it draws. For the Second Amendment bar, it is an invitation worth taking seriously.
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.