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This week, The Associated Press revealed an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo issued in May 2025. It authorizes agents to enter a private home to make an arrest without first obtaining a warrant signed by a judge. The guidance — which numerous legal experts say likely violates the Fourth Amendment — represents just the latest flashpoint in a dizzying year of efforts by the Trump administration to expand the enforcement of immigration law.
Those efforts have included attempts to stretch the use of the wartime Alien Enemies Act, the controversial transfers of some detainees to a violent prison in El Salvador, and a rapid push to expand U.S. detention capacity — first with tents, and, as recently reported, into industrial warehouses as well.
These intensified enforcement efforts have led to record-setting numbers of people in immigration detention — about 73,000 as of this week — and to sustained media coverage and public outcry.
But even as immigration actions have dominated the spotlight, the administration has also moved quickly in other areas of the criminal justice landscape.
Nowhere has that been more apparent than at the Justice Department, where under President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi, the department has seen one of its most tumultuous periods in modern history. Earlier this week, legal analyst Chris Geidner called the “destruction” of the department over the past year “hard to overstate.” Over 6,400 employees (out of about 108,000) have left, with hundreds presumably fired for having worked on investigations that Trump considered illegitimate, including probes into the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and inquiries into criminal conduct by Trump during his first term.
The exodus has hit divisions across the Justice Department, including career national security and counterterrorism prosecutors, as well as the section that handles sensitive public corruption cases. But the brain drain has been especially pronounced at the Civil Rights Division. As of August 2025, about three-quarters of the lawyers there had either resigned or been fired, according to Bloomberg News. Many left as the department turned against its historical task of addressing discrimination against marginalized groups, and instead, urged its lawyers to pursue cases against what Bondi described as illegal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion mandates.
Not only has the division abandoned much of its traditional remit, like investigating local police departments for civil rights abuses, it has also taken on new, unfamiliar work, like a Second Amendment unit focused on “expanding gun rights.”
In response to criticism of this new direction, a Justice Department spokesperson said that Bondi and Civil Rights division chief Harmeet Dhillon have helped restore the division to its “original mission” of protecting the rights of all Americans. It’s worth noting that Congress created the division as part of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, aimed at fighting racist Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement.
The first year of the administration has also been characterized by retreat from the Justice Department’s historic pledge of independence from the White House. Bondi issued a “zealous advocacy” memo nearly a year ago, declaring in essence that the department lawyers are, in fact, Trump’s lawyers. Since then, many of the department’s most visible moves have been in service to Trump’s political conflicts as much as to traditional enforcement priorities. A growing list of the president’s antagonists, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, have found themselves under investigation or indictment. In several of those cases, courts have thrown out charges or issued sharp rebukes of DOJ behavior.
At least one federal judge has also taken aim at the department's decision to cut more than half a billion dollars in Office of Justice Programs grants. The money had been allocated to local governments, law enforcement agencies and nonprofits for everything from police training and equipment, to services for crime victims, community violence interruption programs and justice research. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta called the cuts ‘shameful,’ even as he ruled challengers were in the wrong court to try to stop it.
The Justice Department defended the cuts by arguing the awards no longer fit department priorities, alongside broader cost-cutting efforts.
My colleagues Sophia Nabours and Geoff Hing found that the cancellations created immediate disruptions for recipients who had to pause or scale back work, leave positions open, or lay off staff. In Shreveport, Louisiana, a victim-support nonprofit called Moms on a Mission, which works to support victims of gun violence, described having to pull back on trauma counseling and grief support groups after the cuts.
Similarly, Daphne Duret and I found how the cuts affected a program in rural Alabama that paired sheriff’s deputies with mental health professionals when responding to certain calls. The cuts led to staff departures, and forced officers back to handling mental health calls alone.
The effects of funding cuts for research go beyond what happens at an individual department or agency. The Brennan Center, a liberal-leaning criminal-justice think tank, noted that ending research “make[s] it harder for policymakers of all political stripes to fix shared problems.”
Some also worry that the cuts may imperil some of the dramatic decreases in crime rates the country has seen over recent years. In places like Baltimore, local officials have directly tied improved crime rates to nonprofit work that was cut after DOJ grants were eliminated.
Then there is clemency, the most direct presidential tool in the criminal justice system. Trump began his second term with an unprecedented mass pardon covering roughly 1,500 people charged or convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Since then, the White House has continued to use clemency power in ways that depart from the Justice Department’s traditional review process — a shift underscored by the administration’s dismissal of pardon attorney Liz Oyer, after she declined to fast-track a pardon for actor Mel Gibson, a personal friend of the president. Oyer has since written that Trump is making a “mockery” of the clemency process.
The White House has generally defended its pardons because recipients were “overprosecuted by a weaponized DOJ” under then-President Joe Biden.
The result has led to an informal process that allows wealthy and politically connected people to skip the line, reported The Wall Street Journal. The president’s clemency docket now has a striking appearance of quid pro quo patronage. In several high-profile cases, Trump has granted pardons immediately after the recipient (or their close relatives) poured money into Trump-aligned political committees. In one characteristic example, Trump pardoned former nursing home executive Paul Walczak of tax crimes just weeks after Walczak’s mother attended a $1 million-per-seat fundraiser at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Because Trump’s clemency efforts have been focused on wealthy people convicted of white-collar crimes, he has also erased a historic amount of restitution owed to crime victims and fines owed to the U.S. government. This week, NBC News reported that Trump’s year-one pardons wiped out nearly $300 million owed by people convicted of crimes. By comparison, over the 12 years of the Obama and Biden administrations, just over $3 million in restitution and fines were eliminated.
But while Trump has used clemency aggressively for a select set of well-connected recipients, the broader thrust of the administration’s criminal justice agenda has been toward harsher — and in some cases — more violent punishment.
The Trump Justice Department signaled early in his second term that it would lean back into the federal death penalty, after authoring an execution spree late in his first term. In between the two Trump presidencies, Biden commuted nearly all federal death sentences, leaving Trump without a long list of prisoners awaiting execution. In response, the administration is now pushing several states to file charges against those same people, which could lead to executions under the authority of state laws instead.
Trump also embraced a de facto death penalty for some people accused of foreign drug trafficking, backing a campaign of lethal military strikes on suspected “drug boats” in international waters — a sharp departure from the longstanding policy of interdiction, arrest and trial for alleged narco traffickers. Last month, in a similar vein, Trump signed an executive order designating illicit fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction,” arguing it is “closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic.” This week, Trump said the administration will soon begin targeting drug trafficking by land as well.