100 days of the Trump administration rolling back progress in the criminal legal system

Today, we released a new tracking tool that shows the full scale of the crisis unfolding in communities and behind bars, and a new resource page for folks looking to learn more about the repression and detention of undocumented immigrants.

by Mike Wessler, April 30, 2025

With the first 100 days of President Trump’s second term complete, today, we released a new tracker on our website that highlights the ways the administration is making the criminal legal system larger, harsher, and less effective. The new tool, which will be updated regularly, highlights the ways that the administration is eviscerating the rule of law, undermining solutions that reduce incarceration and improve community safety, encouraging the use of extreme sentences and harsh law enforcement tactics, making prisons and jails worse, and reducing transparency in the carceral system.

Actions from the administration have come so fast that it has been nearly impossible to keep track of them all. This new tool connects the dots on these actions to show that they’re not individual policy choices but instead part of a larger strategy that doubles down on the failed policies that created the nation’s mass incarceration crisis in the first place.

The tracker also explains that, while the federal government directly controls only a relatively small slice of the American carceral system, the administration is using its bully pulpit and control over federal spending to coerce state and local governments into expanding their criminal legal systems and making them even more brutal.

Additionally, today we released a new resource page on our website that focuses on the intersection of criminal and immigration law, often referred to as “crimmigration.” While we include immigration detention in our broad view of mass incarceration, it is not our primary area of expertise. For those looking to learn more about the crimmigration crisis, we have compiled resources from experts and organizations directly focused on immigration on this new page.

The new federal policy tracker is available at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/federaltracker.html

The new crimmigration resource page is available at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2025/04/30/crimmigration_resource_roundup/

This new tracker and resource page are just the first steps in our organization’s commitment to create tools, data, and resources for advocates, lawmakers, and journalists as they work to push back on this new crisis in America’s criminal legal system.