Just over a year ago, Congress passed the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which massively expanded immigration enforcement in American communities by redirecting hundreds of billions of dollars to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). These taxpayer dollars were originally allocated to help families afford health care and groceries. At a time when Americans face an increasing affordability crisis and struggle to pay for basic necessities like food, housing, and health care, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress appropriated $191 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, most of it going to immigration enforcement, on a party-line vote, while cutting $911 billion from health care funding and $186 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Combined with the loss of expanded subsidies to millions of people enrolled in Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace health insurance plans and cuts to community safety programs, these cuts will devastate American families and communities. Over the last year, we have already begun to see the effects: millions of people losing health care, hospitals closing across the country, and billions poured into new immigration jails and ICE assaults on American cities.

In this issue, and in part two that will follow, we ask a few questions that we think should guide our thinking about the future of our justice system. We highlight the current state of the issues that will most impact its future and what investments we need to make now to ensure that the next 250 years are not a return to regressive, failed tactics of the past.

Our country is at a crossroads, and we have the power to decide whether we will lean into or move away from mass incarceration. Those outcomes will be shaped by the choices we make today about safety, justice, and who gets to exercise power in our communities.

Download our one-page explainer that details what the administration is doing, it’s impact, and the ways to get involved.

CORCA allows DHS to circumvent constitutional safeguards by deputizing retailers like Home Depot to do the data collection for them.

At a moment when politicians across the spectrum claim to care about affordability, cash bail remains one of the clearest examples of how poverty itself is punished in America.

While it may look like a commonsense crime bill on the surface, the Combating Organized Crime Act would establish a central intelligence hub for retail theft within the Department of Homeland Security, expanding the agency’s access to protected data from corporations and their influence on local police.

CORCA is not a safety bill, it’s a surveillance bill.

Those closest to a community’s needs and risks are best positioned to shape its justice policies.

The evidence on bail reform contradicts Trump’s rationale for his executive orders.

A man sentenced to life in prison for sexually abusing two middle-school-aged children could end up benefiting from President Donald Trump’s massive slush fund. Andrew Paul Johnson was sentenced earlier this year, just months after being pardoned by Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. Under Trump’s $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” beneficiaries could include Jan. 6 rioters. Johnson allegedly told the kids he abused that he would share millions of dollars in restitution money that he expected from the Trump administration for his Jan. 6 case.

Through zoning ordinances and public pressure, localities fight plans to treat immigrants like packages. Their successes can offer a blueprint for broader resistance.

For those of us keeping score at home of President Trump’s shifting rationales for war this past weekend, one of his more striking claims is that bombs were dropped in Iran to protect the right to protest. Trump—who infamously mused about shooting American protestors during his first term—has not exactly shied away this time around from aggressively, if not forcefully, repressing dissent in his own country.

Criminal justice and immigration reform are facing unprecedented threats during the 47th presidency. From mass deportations and a more punitive approach to charging and sentencing to a weaponized Department of Justice and a constitutional showdown with the courts, Vera's researchers and policy experts are tracking this administration's actions and making meaning of the latest developments out of Washington and its impact across the country.

On October 23, 2025, Democracy Forward filed suit against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to compel the release of public records about the Trump-Vance administration’s abrupt termination of more than $800 million in DOJ grants that supported programs on violence prevention, crime victim services, and community safety.

The past decade has seen increasing momentum for bail reform, with lawmakers, prosecutors, and courts across the country shifting the focus of bail decisions from ability to pay to fairness and public safety. However, reformers must frequently contend with fears that limiting or eliminating money bail will lead to a rise in crime. The data shows that these fears are unfounded, and they shouldn’t stand in the way of reforms that can make our criminal justice system more equitable and humane.

This newsletter is about the dangerous weaponization of crime, which prevents us from both taking a hard look at why crime happens and developing serious solutions to prevent it.

The Gulfstream IV jet was operated by Journey Aviation, a Miami-based charter company that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has previously used to carry out its third-country “deportations” to African countries, but it is owned by Michael Dezer and his family via a shell company. The wealthy often lease their private jets to charter companies part-time to qualify for a huge tax break that Trump signed into law in his first term.

A $608 million federal reimbursement that Florida’s been counting on to pay for the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” lockup won’t cover construction costs — if the money comes through at all, Justice Department lawyers have declared.

President Donald Trump's border czar Tom Homan accepted a $50,000 bag of cash from an undercover FBI agent last year in a since-closed U.S. Justice Department bribery investigation, two sources familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

Nearly half of the FBI agents working in the US’s major field offices have been reassigned to aid immigration enforcement, according to newly released data, a stunning shift in law enforcement priorities that has raised public safety concerns.

Homeland security agents investigating sexual crimes against children, for instance, have been redeployed to the immigrant crackdown for weeks at a time, hampering their pursuit of child predators. A national security probe into the black market for Iranian oil sold to finance terrorism has been slowed down for months because of the shift to immigration work, allowing tanker ships and money to disappear. And federal efforts to combat human smuggling and sex trafficking have languished with investigators reassigned to help staff deportation efforts.

The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.

The so-called One Big Beautiful Act allocates more than $170 billion over four years for border and interior enforcement, with a stated goal of deporting 1 million immigrants each year. That is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal law enforcement agency primarily tasked with carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, now has a larger budget than most of the world’s militaries.

On a winter night last year, shortly after Donald Trump was sworn into office, senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security assembled discreetly at a private home in Washington, D.C., to discuss what they saw as a gathering crisis inside the agency: the relationship between their new boss, Kristi Noem, and Corey Lewandowski, her adviser, enforcer, and rumored boyfriend.

The jets, which a department official said were needed for safety, are the latest expenditures on behalf of Ms. Noem to draw scrutiny from Democrats and other critics who have noted her lavish spending on living and other expenses during her time in public life.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is diverting criminal law enforcement agents away from their investigations and enforcement responsibilities to conduct civil immigration enforcement operations on a massive scale. New data highlight how widespread this misuse of government personnel and resources is. Congress should prevent this diversion of appropriated funds in the next government spending bill.

US immigration officers made false and misleading statements in their reports about several Los Angeles protesters they arrested during the massive demonstrations that rocked the city in June, according to federal law enforcement files obtained by the Guardian.