President Donald Trump announced a pair of executive orders Monday taking aim at cashless bail in deep blue cities.
In his latest effort to crack down on crime in Washington, D.C., the president signed an action purporting to end cashless bail entirely in the nation’s capital. In a separate order, the Trump administration targeted the ‘soft on crime’ policy in the rest of the country.
The Executive Orders
Speaking in the Oval Office Monday, White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf called cashless bail policies “a key driver of the disorder we see on city streets all over America” and said the “catch and release system allows criminals to keep going back out onto the street and reoffending.”
The nationwide order tasks Attorney General Pam Bondi with identifying jurisdictions that have cashless bail policies on the books and then working with the Office of Management and Budget to withhold or revoke federal funds and grants flowing to those jurisdictions. Scharf said the goal is “to ensure that we’re only supporting the people who have reasonable common sense policies around crime.”
History of Cashless Bail
As reported on Tuesday’s AM Update, cashless bail reform movements began across deep blue pockets of the country around the mid-2010s, and the trend really caught fire during the George Floyd era. But the practice started even earlier in some areas.
Washington, D.C., was an early adopter, eliminating cash bail in the 1990s. New Jersey and Illinois followed suit by instituting purely risk-based bail assessments. As Megyn explained, that means “you’re either too risky to be released or you’re not, but there’s no buying your way out of jail.”
At the state level, New Mexico and New York adopted policies heavily curtailing cash bail within the last decade, while Democrat-run cities like Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and San Francisco rolled out bail reforms of their own.
Progressives argue cash bail unjustly punishes low-income offenders who cannot afford to pay, while wealthier suspects walk free ahead of their trials. Supporters counter that it provides a crucial incentive to ensure suspects show up for their court dates, in addition to helping keep repeat offenders off the streets.
Where Trump Stands
Throughout the 2024 campaign, President Trump vowed to reverse soft on crime policies across the U.S., and he said cashless bail is a key piece of that while speaking at the White House on Monday.
“One of the executive orders has to do with cashless bail. That was when the big crime in this country started,” he noted. “They thought it was discriminatory to make people put up money because they just killed three people lying on the street. Any street, all over the country. Cashless bail, we’re ending it.”
At the signing event, AG Bondi highlighted the case of a “single mom” whose house was burglarized twice by the same person after he was let go without bail. She also referenced a man who was killed after someone he got in a fight with was the beneficiary of cashless bail and came back with a gun. “That’s why this is so important,” she said.
These orders come amid reports President Trump is eyeing Chicago and New York City as the next targets for a federal crime crackdown, with Baltimore potentially in the running as well. Megyn said legal challenges are expected for all of the president’s recent actions on crime.
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