The Law That Puts Police Departments Under Consent Decrees Is Now Aimed at San Jose’s $1,591 Carry Permit Fee
The Justice Department’s deadline for San Jose to answer for the nation’s highest carry permit fee expires at 5 p.m. Eastern today. The statute behind the threat is the one that puts police departments under consent decrees.
The San Jose carry permit fee hit $1,591 this year, and the Justice Department’s patience with it runs out at 5 p.m. Eastern today. On September 9, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent the city a two-page letter with the subject line “Notice of Suit: United States v. City of San Jose,” and it reads exactly the way it sounds.
Be clear about what that number is. It isn’t the cost of getting a carry license in San Jose; it’s the city’s application fee alone, before training, fingerprinting, the mandatory psychological exam, and the state’s own application fee stack on top.
What the letter actually says: Dhillon addressed it to Mayor Matt Mahan, Police Chief Paul Joseph, and City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood. She names the specific line item: the city council raised the initial CCW application fee to $1,591 this year under Resolution No. 2026-183. Then comes the sentence that should worry the city’s lawyers: “To our knowledge, San Jose charges the highest CCW application fee in the entire nation.”
She isn’t guessing about the neighborhood, either. The letter runs the price list: San Francisco charges $144. Berkeley charges $255 to apply and $325 more once approved. Santa Clara charges $488 up front and $488 at issuance, and Alameda County charges $347 and $346. San Jose wants more money to open a file than San Francisco collects across eleven applicants.
The legal teeth: The complaint Dhillon says she has authorized carries two claims, and the first is familiar ground. In Bruen, the Supreme Court blessed shall-issue licensing and licensing fees, with one warning attached: regimes can’t be “put toward abusive ends” through “exorbitant fees [that] deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry.” The letter quotes that language back at San Jose and adds the Court’s brand-new Wolford v. Lopez decision from June for good measure.
The second claim is the one that changes the game. The letter says the San Jose Police Department’s enforcement of the fee is a pattern or practice of law enforcement misconduct under 34 U.S.C. § 12601. That’s the statute the federal government uses to put police departments under consent decrees for systematic civil rights abuses. It was built for stop-and-frisk programs and excessive force. Dhillon is aiming it at a fee schedule, and she cites a 2018 Ninth Circuit ruling, United States v. County of Maricopa, holding that officers enforcing an unconstitutional municipal policy violate exactly this section.
Read that claim for what it is. If a fee schedule can be law enforcement misconduct, every gun-hostile city’s fee schedule just became a potential federal case.
What San Jose has to do to stop it: Three things at minimum, straight from the letter: immediately stop enforcing the fees, acknowledge they’re unconstitutional, and sign a court-enforceable consent decree. The letter also doubles as a document-retention notice covering “documents, photos, videos, files, tapes, emails and computer files.” Things that add up to litigation prep, not an invitation to a discussion.
If the city wants to negotiate, it has until 5:00 p.m. Eastern today to contact Barry Arrington, chief of the Civil Rights Division’s Second Amendment Section. Otherwise, in the letter’s words, “the United States may file its complaint without further notice.” As of this morning, San Jose hasn’t said a word publicly.
Where this play already worked: In September 2025, the Civil Rights Division filed its first affirmative gun-rights lawsuit in the department’s history, against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over carry permit delays. We covered how that ended: a county that had issued two permits out of 3,982 applications agreed to process applications on a 120-day clock. Notice, lawsuit, settlement, permits. San Jose’s letter follows that template beat for beat, which tells you DOJ thinks the template is repeatable.
For a sense of scale: the San Jose carry permit fee costs more than three times the street price of a Glock 43X, the slim nine we tested and still recommend for carry.
Glock 43X (9mm, 10+1)
San Jose’s application fee buys three of these with money left for ammo. The 43X is the slim-carry benchmark we reviewed hands-on and still recommend.
The objection worth taking seriously: Permits cost money to process, and Bruen itself says licensing fees are constitutional. Both of those things are true, and neither one rescues San Jose. Exorbitance is the test, and cost recovery has a control group here: San Francisco runs the same state-mandated process, the same background check, under the same Penal Code sections, for $144. When your fee is eleven times the fee of a city running the identical process, the thing being recovered isn’t cost.
The other courtroom: The county surrounding San Jose is already defending its own math. The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office charges $976 all in ($488 to apply, $488 at issuance), and the Second Amendment Foundation and California Rifle & Pistol Association have had it in federal court since September 2025 in Blank v. Santa Clara County, which also challenges the required psychological exam (about $500 out of pocket) and training that runs $250 to $400. That case has a hearing this Thursday, September 17, and the party asking to intervene is California Attorney General Rob Bonta, stepping in to defend the fee scheme. Federal pressure on the city, private litigation against the county, and the state’s top lawyer walking in to hold the line. Same week, same fees, same constitutional question.
The takeaway: A $1,591 application fee doesn’t ration carry permits to the trained and the vetted. It rations them to only those who can afford the high fees, which is precisely the arrangement the Second Amendment exists to forbid, and now there’s a federal statute with teeth attached to that argument. Whether San Jose folds by 5 p.m. or makes DOJ file, the § 12601 theory is loose in the world, and every jurisdiction pricing its residents out of a permit should assume its fee resolution is being read in Washington.
One practical note if you’re mid-application in San Jose: the police department’s own policy says application fees aren’t refunded if you’re denied. Don’t write another check until today’s deadline plays out.
Watch three things: the city’s answer by 5 p.m. today, Thursday’s intervention hearing in Blank, and the Northern District of California docket, where United States v. City of San Jose will land if the city stays quiet.
Do you think a $1,591 application fee is cost recovery, or a price tag on a constitutional right? Let us know in the comments.
Sources: DOJ notice-of-suit letter, posted by AAG Harmeet Dhillon (Sept. 9, 2026); NYSRPA v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022); Wolford v. Lopez, 146 S. Ct. 2032 (2026); DOJ press release on United States v. County of Los Angeles (Sept. 30, 2025); Blank v. Santa Clara County complaint (N.D. Cal. 5:25-cv-08027) and docket; San Jose Police Department CCW policy. Featured photo: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Justin Trump is the managing editor and owner of CAT Outdoors. The son of a Vietnam veteran, he’s a Certified Glock Armorer, an avid gun enthusiast and 2A advocate. He holds two firearm patents for the CAT M4 and Talon tools. When not managing CAT Outdoors, he enjoys spending time with his family and friends, rooting for Michigan sports teams, and serving his church.