The Trump administration in May quietly altered an obscure prison policy that could give the Department of Justice more power to punish the president’s enemies and reward his allies.
A revised Bureau of Prisons policy now grants U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche the authority to overrule the agency's guidelines and unilaterally determine where federal prisoners serve their sentences. Critics of the administration say the policy change opens a pathway for corruption.
“If you're MAGA, you might go to a minimum security camp, or if you've got a couple million bucks to spend, you could buy your way into a halfway house or even home detention,” said Liz Oyer, the former pardon attorney for the Department of Justice who broke the news of the new policy on Instagram in June. The Trump administration fired Oyer in 2025 — she recently filed a lawsuit over her dismissal — and she’s since publicly documented how the Justice Department has corrupted the process of granting presidential pardons. “If you're prosecuted for protesting ICE, for example, or for vandalizing Trump's reflecting pool, you could serve your sentence alongside murderers and rapists.”
The prison assignment policy mirrors other steps that critics say President Donald Trump has taken to use the Justice Department as a political cudgel and a revenue source. Trump has employed his pardon powers to reward donors and allies. And he has used the Department of Justice to prosecute people he considers his enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The new policy radically changes decades-old rules that the Bureau of Prisons used to assign incarcerated people to facilities based on behavior, public safety concerns and other factors, such as crimes, convictions, arrests, escapes, prison disciplinary history, and their mental health and education.
To be sure, the new policy won’t affect most of the 153,000 people in federal prisons. But it could affect those with political connections.
When asked in writing about the new policy by Democratic senators during his confirmation as attorney general, Blanche asserted that prison assignments would be made on “legitimate grounds, and not to favor or to retaliate against any person based on political considerations.”
The Department of Justice, which oversees the Bureau of Prisons, first departed from its traditional prison assignment policy to benefit former socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of sex trafficking of a minor and who was a close associate of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell, Epstein and Trump were friends in the 1990s and early 2000s.
In July 2025, then-Deputy Attorney General Blanche interviewed Maxwell in prison for nine hours over two days. Maxwell told Blanche that she never witnessed Trump doing anything inappropriate, according to a transcript released by the Justice Department. A week later, the Bureau of Prisons transferred Maxwell to a federal prison camp, the system’s lowest-security facility.
BOP policy prohibits the placement of sex offenders and sex traffickers in a prison camp without a waiver “This is not a gray area, not even a question,” said Maureen Baird, a former senior BOP official who helped write the department’s assignment policy. In her experience, Baird said Maxwell is the only sex offender granted a waiver and transferred to a prison camp since the policy took effect in 2006.
U.S. Rep. Deborah Ross, a North Carolina Democrat, told The Marshall Project that BOP created the new policy after she grilled then-Attorney General Pam Bondi at a House hearing in February about Maxwell’s lenient treatment. Ross demanded to know who approved Maxwell’s transfer and special privileges. Bondi declined to say who approved the transfer and said she had nothing to do with it. Bondi added that the answer lay with the Bureau of Prisons, which she oversaw.
A source told The Marshall Project that Rick Stover, special assistant to the director, approved Maxwell’s move to the Bryan prison camp in Texas. On Monday, the Bureau of Prisons press office confirmed that Stover was the “approving official” in Maxwell’s transfer. Stover didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Ross said she thinks Maxwell’s case led to the prison assignment policy change. “It was established to retroactively approve moving Ghislaine Maxwell from a low-security prison, which arguably she shouldn't have been in, to Club Fed, where she could have grapefruit juice and dogs to give her comfort,” she said.
She believes Trump officials later realized the policy could be used to punish enemies, Ross said.
Prior to his confirmation as attorney general, Blanche told Congress he had nothing to do with Maxwell’s transfer. Under both Blanche and Bondi, the Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Justice have failed to provide records of Maxwell’s prison transfer to the Senate and House despite multiple requests and the requirements of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
In a Sept. 11 letter to Ross and other House members, a BOP official wrote that the new assignment policy allowed the transfer of sex offenders to minimum security camps.
Maxwell’s transfer isn’t the only one that broke with BOP guidelines. On Christmas Day 2024, before his second term began, Trump railed on his social media platform about President Joe Biden’s commutations of the sentences of all but three men on death row in federal prisons: “To the 37 most violent criminals, who killed, raped, and plundered like virtually no one before them, but were just given, incredibly, a pardon by Sleepy Joe Biden. I refuse to wish a Merry Christmas to those lucky ‘souls’ but, instead, will say, GO TO HELL!”
The Bureau of Prisons began assigning the men to medium or maximum security prisons, depending on the factors in the long-standing assignment policy. But on his first day back in office, Trump issued an executive order directing the attorney general to imprison the men in conditions “consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes.”
The BOP then assigned all 37 men to the country’s harshest prison in Florence, Colorado, where they would serve their sentences in solitary confinement. Under the prior guidelines, eight prisoners with severe mental illness would not have gone to the supermax. Neither would a man working as a prison porter with a spotless disciplinary record after 24 years nor men with serious medical conditions.
The ACLU and federal public defenders have challenged many of the transfers in court. A Bureau of Prisons official asserted in a court filing that he weighed every case individually before assigning all to the supermax. A federal judge disagreed, calling the exercise “a cookie-cutter process that yielded the same predetermined result.” Only 12 of the men are currently at the Colorado supermax.
The prison assignment policy may become yet another example of what critics say is Trump turning the Department of Justice into his personal and political law firm. He appointed Blanche, his former criminal defense lawyer, as deputy attorney general and later elevated him to attorney general.
On the first day of his second term, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people convicted in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Now, Trump has allegedly turned pardons into a pay-for-play economy.
One prominent pardon recipient was Trevor Milton, the founder of electric truck startup Nikola, who was convicted on fraud charges in 2022. He and his wife donated $1.8 million to Trump’s 2024 election. Days before Milton was to report to prison to serve a four-year sentence, Trump pardoned him. This wiped out the $675 million in restitution that prosecutors said Milton owed his victims. Milton has maintained his innocence and has said his contributions to Trump had nothing to do with his pardon.
Just as the new prison assignment policy has broken with long-standing BOP rules, recent pardons have violated decades-old Justice Department guidelines while depriving crime victims and taxpayers of more than $1.5 billion in restitution and fines.
The new assignment policy is likely to make prisons more dangerous and difficult to manage, said Janet Perdue, a former senior BOP official. Giving special treatment to certain well-connected people or punishing enemies can demoralize staff and build resentment among other prisoners, she said.
“This classification tool is the safest way to house people, that's safe for staff, and that's safe for inmates,” Perdue said. “If you start pulling people out of their element and putting them in places where it leaves them vulnerable, that can become a dangerous situation.”
Ross said she expects Blanche to use the prison assignment power corruptly. “He would never be in this position but for Donald Trump,” she said. “He's going to use whatever power he has for Donald Trump.”
