Since announcing the temporary federal takeover of Washington, D.C.’s, law enforcement, President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized state laws limiting the use of cash bail. But his arguments have strayed from the facts in three key areas:
- Trump claimed that “every place in the country where you have no cash bail is a disaster.” But the balance of crime data doesn’t support the idea that crime has worsened as a result of the policies.
- The president misleadingly claimed that under cashless bail policies, “Somebody murders somebody and they’re out on no cash bail before the day is out.” Some states that require cashless bail have exemptions for violent felonies and murder. And in the states where it is possible for a murder suspect to be freed pending trial without cash bail, per a judge’s discretion, it is exceedingly rare.
- Trump said, “We’re going to end that in Chicago,” via federal legislation. But it is unclear whether the U.S. Congress can pass a law to directly nullify state bail laws.
Numerous states and cities have passed laws limiting the use of cash bail, though each is a little different. Some states with cashless bail policies still allow cash bail for violent felonies and murder, such as New York. Most include some sort of risk assessment to determine whether someone can be held in jail pending trial.
The move in some states toward cashless bail was prompted by those who argued cash bail unfairly punishes those who can’t afford to pay it, leaving them to await trial in jail. Opponents have criticized the laws as soft-on-crime policy that worsens crime.
Trump, who has long railed against so-called cashless bail, raised the issue in his Aug. 11 press conference announcing the temporary federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, D.C, which includes an infusion of National Guard and other federal law enforcement in the nation’s capital.
“The radical left City Council [in Washington] adopted no cash bail,” Trump said. “By the way, every place in the country where you have no cash bail is a disaster. That’s what started the problem in New York, and they don’t change it. … That’s what started it in Chicago. I mean, bad politicians started it, bad leadership started it. But that was the one thing that’s central, no cash bail.”
“Somebody murders somebody and they’re out on no cash bail before the day is out,” Trump claimed.
Trump then vowed he would overturn these local and state bail laws via federal legislation.
“We’re going to end that in Chicago,” Trump said. “But we’re going to change no cash bail. We’re going to change the statute and get rid of some of the other things and we’ll count on the Republicans in Congress and Senate to vote. We have the majority, so we’ll vote.”
Crime Stats After Bail Changes
Although Trump claimed that “every place in the country where you have no cash bail is a disaster,” crime statistics overall don’t support that.
Trump specifically mentioned the policies in New York and Chicago as having “started the [crime] problem” in those areas.
The Illinois Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equality-Today Act — better known as the SAFE-T Act — was signed into law in 2021. One part of the law, known as the Pretrial Fairness Act, eliminated cash bail for all offenses. It went into effect in September 2023. However, the act still allowed judges to detain a person who is considered a flight risk or who poses a threat to “any other person or the community.” A judge could also detain someone because of the nature of the crime.
Overall, year-to-date crime from January to August 2025 dropped 15% compared with the same period in 2023, which was before the law went into effect, according to Chicago Police Department data. Murder is down 37%; robbery is down 36%; aggravated battery is down 5%, and burglary is down 18%.
In September 2024, Loyola University of Chicago’s Center for Criminal Justice published a report comparing the first six months of 2023 with the first six months of 2024 (after the new law went into effect). It found that violent crimes decreased by 7% and property crimes by 14%.
“This does not answer the question of the PFA’s [Pretrial Fairness Act’s] impact, if any, on crime and public safety,” the report states. “It’s possible, for example, that crime would have declined further in the absence of the PFA. But it does confirm the unanimous sense of the Illinois practitioners we interviewed, that (as several of them put it) ‘the sky did not fall’ when the PFA went into effect.”
As for New York, its bail laws have been revised several times since the state Legislature created a 2019 law that eliminated the use of money bail and jail before trial for most misdemeanors and lower-level felonies. When crime began to rise in 2020 during the pandemic — as it did around the country in cities regardless of bail policies — lawmakers made several revisions to the law, allowing judges the discretion to set cash bail even in some cases involving lower-level offenses. However, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, there was “no evidence showing a connection between bail reform and rising crime rates.”
A study put out by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in October 2023 examined the effect of eliminating bail in New York City and concluded, “Eliminating the option to set bail under the reform was not associated with a change in overall re-arrest, felony re-arrest, or violent felony re-arrest rates within either 2 years or during the pretrial period.” The study did find a “statistically significant” increase in violent felony re-arrests in the pretrial period among “‘high risk’ individuals with a separate pending case at the time of arraignment.” According to the authors, their findings were “broadly consistent” with two earlier studies that “found no impact of bail reform on crime rates within New York City or statewide.”
According to New York City Criminal Justice Agency data, between January and May of this year, about 5% of those released pending trial were rearrested. Most of those rearrests were for misdemeanor offenses, but about 1% of those awaiting trial were rearrested for nonviolent felonies and less than 1% for violent felonies.
A 2022 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights included an analysis of crime trends in Washington, D.C., between 2015 and 2019 and concluded the city’s system, as set by the 1992 D.C. Bail Reform Act, “has been successful in releasing defendants pretrial without sacrificing public safety and maintaining high court appearance rates.”
“Throughout each of these years, between 88 and 91 percent of individuals released pretrial appeared at their court dates,” the report states. “Further, between 86 and 89 percent of individuals who were released pretrial were not re-arrested during this period, and between 98 percent and 99 percent of defendants released pretrial were not re-arrested during the pretrial period for a violent crime.”
Research by Jaquelyn L. Jahn at Drexel University and Jessica T. Simes and Jonathan Jay at Boston University published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2024 focused on the bail laws in New Jersey and concluded that gun violence did not increase or significantly change despite substantial declines to jail incarceration under its new policies, and even as national rates of gun violence increased during its study years.
That’s true in other places that have moved away from cash bail as well. The Brennan Center for Justice evaluated crime trends in 22 cities across the country that enacted some form of bail policies aimed at reducing cash bail and compared them with cities that did not. The 2024 report found “no statistically significant relationship between bail reform and crime rates. In other words, there is no reason to believe that bail reform has led to increased crime.”
“These findings add to a growing body of literature showing that bail reform is an unlikely explanation for recent trends in crime, whether increases or decreases,” the Brennan report stated. “And they suggest that policymakers’ recent focus on weakening bail reforms as a response to crime has been misguided — and a distraction from smarter and more promising ways to enhance public safety.” Among those alternatives, the report said, are expanding access to mental health and substance abuse treatment programs.
The Trump Administration’s Case
A White House official, who reiterated Trump’s claim that “cashless bail is a disastrous policy that makes cities across the country significantly more dangerous,” cited research from Yolo County, California, where the district attorney spearheaded a 2022 analysis of the local effect of an emergency state pandemic policy adopted in April 2020, setting bail at “$0” for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies — with some exceptions.
According to the analysis, 70% of the people released from custody under the emergency guidelines were rearrested, and about half of those released were rearrested more than once. Rearrest charges included one for homicide, five for attempted homicide, 32 for robbery and 46 for assault with a deadly weapon.
The following year, the district attorney released a follow-up study that compared a random sample of people released as part of the emergency pandemic policy with a sample of people released with bail prior to the pandemic, and concluded that those released as part of the pandemic policy were far more likely to have been rearrested.
Notably, however, the California zero bail policy differed from most modified bail policies in other states in that it did not include mandatory risk assessments prior to release. It was simply aimed at trying to relieve the spread of COVID-19 in jails and courts by reducing the number of defendants awaiting trial in jail.
“The whole point of this study is not to debate the merits of some type of bail reform. It’s to look at the issue of zero bail where people are being automatically released,” Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig, who initiated the study, told CBS News in January.
The emergency policy resulted in the release of suspects by jailers, without judges considering things like criminal history or repeated offenses, Reisig said. Reisig told CBS News the study suggests judges should be deciding who gets released without bail.
“I’m convinced, based on the data, that judges would have held people on bail,” Reisig said.
“I actually do support smart bail reform,” Reisig said. “One-hundred percent. Zero-dollar bail is not smart bail reform, and it’s resulted in people being killed. That’s what the data shows. Now, let’s have some robust discussions about what, if anything, we do to fix the bail system.”
Meanwhile, the Public Policy Institute of California did an analysis of the statewide effect of the state’s emergency zero-dollar bail policy and found that “during the early disruptive months of the COVID pandemic, implementation of emergency bail orders caused notable increases in both the likelihood and number of rearrests within 30 days.”
While most of the rearrests were for felonies, there was no evidence of an increase in violent felonies, the report stated.
“Lower-level offenders released on zero bail were not more likely to be rearrested for violent felonies after implementation,” the report said. “About four months after implementation, as the most volatile period of the pandemic passed, the overall effect on rearrests began to wane, at least for the 27 counties that continued emergency orders through 2020. After a year, the average effect of implementation was no longer statistically significant.”
Moreover, the study found that over time as counties revoked the emergency bail orders — which took place from June 2020 to July 2023 — it “did not affect rearrests, regardless of offense type.”
“The disruptive nature of the pandemic was likely a key factor in the temporary increase in overall rearrests when emergency bail orders were in place,” the report’s authors wrote. “Notably, increases in felony rearrests did not subside over time or when emergency orders were revoked.” (Emphasis theirs.)
Murderers Not Immediately Set Free
In his press conference on Aug. 11, Trump said that under the policies, “Somebody murders somebody and they’re out on no cash bail before the day is out.” In remarks on Aug. 13, Trump again lambasted “cashless bail,” calling it “nonsense,” and said, “We want to make it so that people, if they murder somebody, they’re in jail, they don’t get out on no bail.”
The laws differ, but some states recommend no release for those charged with violent felonies and murders. That’s the case in New Jersey and New York, for example.
But even in states that don’t stipulate such restrictions, judges still have the discretion to deny release to defendants who are deemed a risk, including those charged with murder.
“In Illinois, every case has the discretion of the judge on whether or not to release the accused,” David Stovall, a faculty member in the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois Chicago, told us via email. “Currently no one accused of murder (capital murder nor homicide) has been released to the public. It’s a misconception that’s rampant unfortunately.”
But there was one case. As the White House noted, in 2024 a Rockford, Illinois, judge released from jail a man accused of first-degree murder pending his trial.
“I’ve considered the arguments of counsel, the evidence that’s been presented, the proffers, the pretrial service report, risk assessments, and the defendant’s criminal history. I have a lot of concerns about this,” Winnebago County Judge Debra Schafer said at the time. “It is a circumstantial link. There are no allegations that [defendant] made any statements relating to this. There are some veiled statements by codefendant pointing fingers in the direction of [defendant].”
The judge said that while there was probable cause to move the case forward, “I can’t find at this time that there’s clear and convincing evidence” to detain him without bail “and consequently I have to release him. That is as a result of this offense and what I’m being held to [with the new bail law].” The judge added, however, that the defendant was “going to have to follow some fairly strict requirements.”
We couldn’t find any other examples of defendants facing murder charges being released without bail in any of the handful of states that have enacted some form of cashless bail.
“People charged with murder can certainly be released pending trial,” Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, told us via email. “While it might be rare, it is legally possible as pretrial release is supposed to be based on public safety risk and risk of flight/failure to appear for trial. That assessment is made by the judge/magistrate and no bail reform, to our knowledge, mandated release for people charged with murder.”
The White House pointed to two convicted murderers who were released without bail in New York after being arrested on drug dealing charges. But both of those cases involved men who were previously convicted of murder and served lengthy prison sentences. They were both arrested on drug charges after they had been released from prison. Whether or not it was appropriate or prudent to release either of those men without bail, neither case involved a person facing a murder charge being released without money bail — the scenario Trump described.
Trump has long railed against “no cash bail,” often wrongly claiming it means that accused murderers are immediately let go pending trial.
In 2024, Trump claimed his opponent, then Vice President Kamala Harris, “supports abolishing cash bail, which means bloodthirsty criminals that just killed somebody can immediately leave custody, go out and kill somebody else, which, by the way, they often do.”
As we wrote at the time, that’s not how it works.
“It depends on what cash bail is replaced with,” Kellen Funk, a legal historian and law professor at Columbia Law School, told us in an email for that story. “No serious commentator or politician has proposed eliminating cash bail and replacing it only with automatic release.”
Funk said proposals often “replace cash bail with judicial discretion,” which gives judges the option to detain defendants until trial, release them with “nonfinancial conditions” such as drug testing and a curfew, or release them without conditions except a requirement to appear in court.
For “felony homicide,” he said, “the law might recommend detention or set a presumption in favor of it, and in most cases in practice judges are inclined to order detention when the charges involve violent felonies.”
Changing the Laws
In remarks on Aug. 13, Trump said he would start by trying to change the bail laws in Washington, D.C., “and then ultimately for the rest of the country.”
After the president made his announcement about the temporary takeover of Washington, D.C., law enforcement, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said his committee is “advancing legislative solutions to protect Americans in their capital city” and planned to hold hearings with local officials in September.
In his press conference on Aug. 11, Trump said, “We’re going to end that in Chicago,” referring to the state’s no cash bail law. He said he would “count on the Republicans in Congress and Senate to vote. We have the majority, so we’ll vote.”
Immediately after he made his comments, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik vowed that she “will be leading legislation to end [New York Gov.] Kathy Hochul and New York’s failed bail reform once and for all to Save New York and Save America.”
But while the U.S. Congress has the authority to overturn or modify laws passed by the Washington, D.C., government, that’s less clear when it comes to a federal law overriding state bail laws.
Trump’s call for Congress to ban cashless bail policies around the country “oversteps constitutional boundaries,” Lisel Petis, policy director of criminal justice and civil liberties for the think tank R Street Institute, wrote in a commentary after Trump’s Aug. 11 press conference.
“The Constitution is pretty clear on this one,” Petis wrote. “The Tenth Amendment says that any powers not given to the federal government belong to the states or the people. That includes the power to decide how to handle bail. Congress has no general authority to dictate how states set their bail laws. Bail policy falls under a state’s police powers—the authority to set laws and procedures that protect public safety and maintain order. These are core functions of state sovereignty.”
However, Congress could opt instead for a carrot-and-stick approach to discourage cashless bail policies by tying such policies to a state’s eligibility for federal grants. That’s what some Democrats tried in 2021 when they proposed a bill that would have made “a state that uses a money bail system ineligible for funds under the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program.”
“There is so much federal money going into states,” Meryl Chertoff, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law School, told Time, “and what the President has done is say, if you don’t cooperate with me on, let’s say, sanctuary city policies or immigration enforcement, I am going to withhold money that goes into your programs.”
Tying law enforcement priorities to eligibility for federal funding, Chertoff said, is “doing indirectly what he [Trump] cannot under the 10th Amendment, which provides states with a degree of autonomy.”
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.