President Donald Trump on Monday signed two executive orders targeting cashless bail, claiming that the practice in certain Democratic cities is leading to criminal activity.
“That was when the big crime in this country started,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “Somebody kills somebody, they go in, ‘Don’t worry about it—no cash, come back in a couple of months, we’ll give you a trial,’ you never see the person again.”
The President said he plans to eliminate the practice, starting with his federal takeover of Washington, D.C., which he claims has been a hotbed of crime despite declining crime rates. “We’re starting by ending it in D.C., and that we have the right to do through federalization,” he said.
He also criticized Illinois, which in 2023 became the first state to completely eliminate cash bail. “They have a great cashless bail. You don’t even have to go to court sometimes,” Trump mocked.
Here’s what to know.
What is cashless bail?
Cashless bail is a system that allows people to be released from pretrial detention without paying any money. The condition of release depends largely on the severity of the crime, meaning that individuals accused of certain low-level, non-violent crimes have a higher chance of being released before trial.
Proponents of cashless bail argue that its counterpart, cash bail, is unjust, particularly to poor people. Those who cannot afford to bail themselves out may resort to extortionary private bail bond companies. Or if they can’t pay bail, they have to stay in jail despite not being convicted of any crime.
In a 2019 book excerpt published in TIME, criminal justice advocate Alec Karakatsanis wrote, “In the six years before my organization, Civil Rights Corps, filed a constitutional civil rights lawsuit challenging the money bail system in Harris County, Texas, 55 human beings died in the local jail in downtown Houston because they were too poor to buy their release before trial.”
Data from the Vera Institute of Justice, an organization that advocates for alternatives to cash bail, shows that roughly half of people in the U.S. struggle to afford a $400 emergency expense. The Eighth Amendment prohibits excessive bail, though the average bail set on a felony case is $10,000.
The American Civil Liberties Union, in a statement after Trump issued his latest executive orders targeting cashless bail, said the people “who will be most impacted are those with the fewest resources. Whether we can afford to pay should never determine our freedom.”
Which U.S. jurisdictions have cashless bail?
At the federal level, cash bail for those charged with federal crimes was largely curtailed by the Bail Reform Act of 1966, which aimed “to assure that all persons, regardless of their financial status, shall not needlessly be detained pending their appearance to answer charges, to testify, or pending appeal.” But this was repealed by an amendment in 1984. The 1984 law “substantially modified modern operations of federal criminal courts, establishing a practice whereby certain charges would almost certainly result in preventative detention,” according to a report released earlier this year by the nonprofit The Bail Project.
States and smaller local jurisdictions have also implemented their own bail reforms. Washington, D.C., has operated without a money bail system since 1992, instead relying on judges’ risk assessments to determine whether someone who is awaiting trial is a flight risk or a threat to public safety.
New Jersey also adopted a pretrial public safety assessment as an alternative to cash bail in 2017. New York removed cash bail for certain crimes in 2020.
In 2023, Los Angeles County implemented a Pre-Arraignment Release Protocol, a “zero-bail” policy system that eliminated cash bail except for the most serious of crimes. Illinois, however, made history the same year, becoming the first state to abolish cash bail altogether, after the state’s Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a law that would abolish it.
Criticisms of cashless bail policies
Trump and his team have argued that cashless bail enables more crimes. “Cashless bail—they thought it was discriminatory to make people put up money because they just killed three people lying on a street,” the President said in the Oval Office.
A fact sheet released by the White House reads: “Cashless bail policies allow dangerous individuals to immediately return to the streets and further endanger law-abiding, hard-working Americans because they know our laws will not be enforced.”
A connection between bail reform and crime rates, however, has not been clearly established.
The factsheet cited a 2023 study from the District Attorney’s Office of Yolo County, Calif., which found that the county’s COVID-era “zero bail” policy resulted in 163% more crime and 200% more violent crime compared to those who posted bail from April 2020 to May 2021. The study, however, noted that “individuals were released without any conditions and without any type of risk assessment conducted.”
A Brennan Center for Justice report in August 2024 found that while both politicians and police leaders have blamed cashless bail and similar policies for upticks in violent crime, there is “no statistically significant relationship” between the two, after researchers compared 22 U.S. jurisdictions with bail reform policies to 11 without.
A year after the law eliminating cash bail in Illinois took effect, researchers at the Loyola Chicago Center for Criminal Justice released a report that said: “While we lack the data needed for a causal analysis at this point, we can say at least that crime in Illinois did not go up.”
Trump, however, appears to echo Republicans’ false claims that Democrat-led jurisdictions have suffered disproportionately from violent crimes. “When I’m re-elected, I will crack down on the left-wing jurisdictions that refuse to prosecute dangerous criminals and set loose violent felons on cashless bail,” Trump said in 2024, which was quoted in the White House fact sheet.
Trump’s orders on cashless bail
One executive order was specific to D.C., where Trump ordered law enforcement to ensure that those arrested in the capital “are held in Federal custody to the fullest extent permissible under applicable law” and, to the extent possible, to “pursue Federal charges and pretrial detention for such arrestees.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi is also tasked with reviewing practices by D.C. law enforcement that could result in pretrial release of criminal defendants who “pose a threat to public safety.” Under the order, she must also review the capital’s cashless bail policies and “press” the district to change them. Pressure may include “federal funding decisions or the provision of Federal services or approvals by agency heads, as well as actions the Attorney General identifies as necessary and appropriate.”
The other order has a national scope: the Attorney General must submit a list within 30 days of state and local jurisdictions “that have, in the Attorney General’s opinion, substantially eliminated cash bail as a potential condition of pretrial release” for crimes “that pose a clear threat to public safety and order.” These, according to the order, may include violent, sexual, or indecent acts, or burglary, looting, and vandalism.
The Administration will then identify federal funds currently provided to those jurisdictions that may be suspended or terminated.
The post What Is Cashless Bail and What Do Trump’s Executive Orders Do? appeared first on TIME.
