On January 20, 2025, as Donald Trump retook the presidency, advocates across the criminal justice reform field were all asking the same question: in his second term, would Donald Trump be a friend or foe to reform?
Despite President Trump’s “tough-on-crime” and “tough-on-the-border” campaign and the numerous actions he took to undermine criminal justice progress during his first term, it was a reasonable question. Trump’s first term saw the passage of several important federal criminal justice reforms—most notably the First Step Act, as well as the reinstatement of Pell Grants for incarcerated students, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, support for second-chance hiring, and an executive order on police reform. Throughout his first term, criminal justice reform also enjoyed strong bipartisan support at the state and local levels, with landmark reforms to bail, sentencing, conviction records, fines and fees, and more across the country.
Trump also retook office as the first incoming president with a felony record. He had an axe to grind against a legal system that he believes was weaponized against him. On the campaign trail, he openly (some would say cynically) tried to appeal to Black voters by saying that he understood “corrupt systems that try to target and subjugate others to deny them their freedom and to deny them their rights.” Whether this sentiment would translate to more support for reform remained an open question.
After the first 100 days of this administration’s presidency, all signs indicate that the criminal justice field should not hold out hope for sweeping reform. And even if reform does emerge, we must ask ourselves: can we justify supporting anything the Trump administration does, given the serious damage it continues to inflict upon basic due process, the rule of law, and the very existence of the criminal justice reform field?
Why is there hope for more criminal justice reform under Trump?
While the American public is divided along partisan lines on virtually every major policy issue—from healthcare and taxes to the economy and abortion—criminal justice reform is among the few areas of enduring consensus. A 2024 poll showed that 81 percent of voters, including 75 percent of Republicans, support criminal justice reform, and a substantial portion of voters from both parties say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports it. It is an issue that touches most people: nearly one in two Americans have had an immediate family member incarcerated. And Gallup polling shows that trust in the criminal justice system is similarly low among Democrats and Republicans.
And more than any other recent president, Democrat or Republican, Donald Trump passed significant criminal justice legislation in his first term. While sometimes disparaged as too incremental and bogged down by poor implementation, the First Step Act is nevertheless broadly considered one of the most important federal criminal justice reforms in recent history. Less high-profile—but still hugely meaningful—was the reinstatement of Pell Grants for incarcerated students, which Trump signed as a lame duck in 2020. He also signed the CARES Act, which allowed more than 13,000 people to leave federal prison for home confinement during the pandemic. And he issued several justice-related acts of clemency in his first term, including to justice reform advocate Alice Marie Johnson. Trump never passed the Second Step Act, which he announced in 2019 to help formerly incarcerated people gain employment—a promise he reiterated to Black voters during his first reelection campaign—but he took several steps to support second-chance hiring, including signing the Fair Chance Act. While Trump’s response to the George Floyd protests turned noxious, he did issue a largely forgotten executive order that, among other things, sought to establish a database of police misconduct (which he recently mothballed) and encourage co-responder programs addressing mental health, substance use, and homelessness. Even as Trump overtly undertook many of these actions just to win over Black voters, the end result was nevertheless progress.
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