Harmeet Dhillon just told Fox News the quiet part out loud, and gun owners should be paying attention

The bottom line

Harmeet Dhillon sat down with Fox News on July 8 and laid out, in her own words, a Justice Department litigation campaign that is now hitting California, Virginia, Colorado, Denver, and Washington D.C. all at once. People love to dunk on this DOJ, and plenty of that criticism was earned under Pam Bondi. It is not earned here. Dhillon is doing exactly what she said she would do, and gun owners in blue states are the ones who benefit.

This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.

What Dhillon actually said

On July 8, 2026, Fox News ran an exclusive interview with Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, under the headline “Inside Trump’s unprecedented battle plan to expand Second Amendment rights through Justice Department.” The Second Amendment Section, the unit inside her division that has been filing these suits, sits under her authority, and she was blunt about the scale of it. “Since we started the Second Amendment section last year and even before that, we filed over a dozen lawsuits challenging different restrictions in different jurisdictions,” she said. She also said something I keep coming back to: “There are a lot of people out there in the Second Amendment community who would like us to challenge every restriction on guns. That’s really not our approach. We have an approach that tries to make law for the land and that’s got some appellate strategy in it.” She’s running a real litigation program aimed at binding circuit and Supreme Court precedent, and she’s picking her targets on purpose.

She called it “a really historic amount of activity from the Department of Justice to protect the Second Amendment,” adding, “it’s never been done before,” and described the effort as “pioneering.” I don’t think that’s spin. Go through the list of what her division has actually filed this year and it holds up.

The receipts

Start with California. On July 1, 2026, the same day it took effect, DOJ sued the state in the Central District of California over what the interview and Dhillon’s own commentary call the “Glock ban,” AB 1127. Signed by Governor Newsom in October 2025 and codified as Penal Code § 27595, the law bans the retail sale, transfer, and delivery of striker-fired semiautomatic pistols capable of accepting auto-sear conversion devices, which in practice means most modern Glock-pattern handguns. The same suit also targets California’s Unsafe Handgun Act and its handgun roster system, which has kept huge swaths of the ordinary handgun market off California shelves for years. Dhillon’s office reportedly gave Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta a week to talk settlement before filing. They passed. Newsom’s spokeswoman, Diana Crofts-Pelayo, responded that the state “won’t be intimidated by another politically motivated lawsuit” and would “continue defending the laws that protect Californians and keep dangerous weapons off our streets.” In the interview, Dhillon pointed out that by some estimates two-thirds of handguns in personal use in this country are Glocks, and that she personally owned Glocks before moving to California and couldn’t buy one there today. The most common defensive handgun platform in America is banned from sale in the country’s largest state.

Then there’s Virginia. SB 749, Governor Spanberger’s assault weapons ban, was signed May 14, 2026, and DOJ filed United States v. Commonwealth of Virginia, No. 3:26-cv-00610, in the Eastern District of Virginia on July 1, 2026, in front of Judge Roderick C. Young, invoking 34 U.S.C. § 12601, the same pattern-or-practice statute DOJ normally uses against police departments. Spanberger’s office called the law “common sense legislation to save lives,” and said she remains “committed to making the Commonwealth a safer home for every family.” Dhillon’s answer to that framing, both in the interview and echoed on the show, is that the Supreme Court has already foreclosed a balancing-test defense of arms bans. “The United States Supreme Court has ruled that we don’t get to do balancing with respect to certain fundamental rights,” she said, comparing Virginia’s position to arguing you should be allowed to censor speech you don’t like because it feels like common sense. She’s right that this is the same argument, dressed up differently in every state that tries it. It’s also worth remembering that SB 749 was already enjoined statewide on June 25 by a Lancaster County judge in Crump v. Katz, so DOJ is now pressing a federal case against a law that a state court has already frozen once.

Denver and Colorado came earlier in the year but belong on the same list. DOJ sued Denver on May 5, 2026, over its 1989 assault weapons ban, and sued Colorado the very next day over its magazine capacity restrictions. Washington D.C. has been in DOJ’s sights even longer, with an amended complaint filed May 14, 2026, adding the District’s suppressor ban to an existing challenge of its AR-15 restrictions, naming the Metropolitan Police Department and its acting chief directly. Add Los Angeles County’s concealed carry permit delays and the U.S. Virgin Islands’ firearm regulations, both mentioned in the same interview, and you have a Justice Department running simultaneous litigation on both coasts, in a territory, and in the nation’s capital, all built around the same core argument: the Second Amendment doesn’t bend because a state legislature or city council decided it should.

Not everyone in government is the enemy, and I need people to sit with that

I understand the instinct to distrust anyone with a DOJ badge after the last few administrations, and honestly after some of what came out of this one under Pam Bondi before Trump fired her on April 2, 2026, and elevated Todd Blanche to acting Attorney General. I’m not going to pretend Bondi was some Second Amendment champion, because she wasn’t, even if she wasn’t the worst AG we’ve ever had either. But the personnel change matters. Blanche has been more willing to let this litigation run than his predecessor was, and Dhillon has been building this Second Amendment Section methodically since last year rather than making noise without follow-through.

Watch her appearances and you’ll notice a pattern: she names the case, she names the date, and then the case actually gets filed. She said she’d sue over Virginia’s ban. Done. She said she’d sue over California’s Glock ban. Done. That is not somebody performing for the base. If you want to be angry that this DOJ hasn’t gone after the NFA or hasn’t moved fast enough on suppressors nationally, fine, have that argument. But don’t tell me Dhillon is a traitor to the cause because I’ve seen the actual docket. Every time we get an ally inside a federal agency that has historically treated our rights as negotiable, we should recognize it and use it instead of reflexively torching it because the administration got other things wrong. This is one they are getting right, and the docket is going to matter long after this week’s news cycle moves on.