Trump's Distortions on Cashless Bail
As part of his recent crackdown on crime, President Donald Trump says he plans to put an end to cashless bail policies enacted in some cities and states where officials have argued cash bail unfairly punishes those accused of crimes who can’t afford to pay it, leaving them to await trial in jail.
On Aug. 25, Trump signed an executive order that threatens to deny federal funding to local and state governments that offer cashless bail.
FactCheck.org’s deputy director, Rob Farley, zeroed in on two claims the president made days before the executive order was announced that underpin his opposition to the cashless bail policies.
Trump claimed that “every place in the country where you have no cash bail is a disaster.” But we found the balance of crime data doesn’t support the idea that crime has worsened as a result of the policies.
The president also 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 has railed against cashless bail for years, and returned to 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.
Trump specifically criticized the policies in New York and Chicago and blamed them for having “started” the crime problems in those areas. But crime statistics don't support that.
In Chicago, for example, year-to-date crime from January to August 2025 dropped 15% compared with the same period in 2023, which was before an Illinois law eliminating cash bail 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%.
A September 2024 report from Loyola University of Chicago’s Center for Criminal Justice also found that crime dropped in the first six months after the law went into effect. But that doesn’t necessarily end the issue.
“It’s possible … that crime would have declined further in the absence of” Illinois’ cashless bail policy, the report states. “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 [the cashless bail law] went into effect.”
To read more, including our analysis of the data the White House provided to us to back up the president’s claims, see our story, “Trump’s Distortions on Cashless Bail.”
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