Case Explained: Five Criminal Justice Issues to Watch During Trump’s Second Year in Office – Legal Perspective

At this time last year, President Donald Trump’s return to office was shrouded in uncertainty for the justice reform movement. Would he build on 2018’s First Step Act with further criminal justice reform? How serious were his campaign-trail promises of mass deportations and expansive immigration crackdowns?

Whatever ambiguity lingered after Trump’s first term, however, disappeared almost immediately upon his return to office, as he quickly began executing an agenda more organized and ruthless than before. In 37 executive orders put forward in its first week, the Trump administration moved to expand the death penalty, further criminalize immigration, and escalate the “War on Drugs.”

Now, as 2026 begins, we have a much better sense of Trump’s agenda. His administration is testing norms and boundaries at breakneck speed: eroding due process, threatening to invoke domestic terrorism to intimidate nonprofits and criminalize dissent, undermining the criminal justice system with corrupt pardons, helping drive a surge in use of the death penalty, weaponizing the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and much more.

Against this backdrop, here are five issues we predict will be relevant to the criminal justice reform field in the year ahead:

1. The recent Supreme Court ruling against National Guard deployment in Chicago may lead Trump to use the Insurrection Act.

This week, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to protests in Minnesota. (He subsequently walked it back but left the option on the table.) That threat may be related to a series of court decisions at the end of 2025 around Trump’s effort to weaponize the National Guard under the guise of crimefighting. The Supreme Court ruled against the deployment of Guard troops in Illinois, and in California, a federal appeals court ordered Trump to return control of the Guard to Governor Gavin Newsom. Following the Supreme Court decision, Trump abandoned his attempted deployments in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon.

Despite these legal setbacks, Trump will almost certainly continue pushing to send the Guard into Democrat-led cities—especially those in red states where leadership has proven either welcoming or unwilling to challenge deployments, as in Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans. Though constitutional challenges present a speed bump to Trump’s use of the Guard, they also raise larger questions around how far the administration will go to pursue its agenda.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Chicago potentially opened the door to invoking the Insurrection Act. The Supreme Court held that the president cannot federalize a state’s National Guard unless he is “unable” to uphold federal law using active-duty military. While the Posse Comitatus Act generally prevents the military from engaging in domestic law enforcement activities, the Insurrection Act offers a notable exception. It allows the president to deploy the military and federalized Guard troops to “suppress rebellion” or “enforce the laws” if states cannot. As Adam Liptak writes in the New York Times, the Court decision “all but dared the administration to make more extreme arguments.” Others, like legal scholar Steve Vladeck, argue that the decision does not meaningfully change the factors that have been holding back Trump from going down this path.

Even without invoking the Insurrection Act, Trump is already using the military domestically in unprecedented ways, from deploying troops across several southern states for immigration enforcement to sending active-duty forces into Los Angeles to quell protests. His war on “blue” cities is likely far from over—making the question not whether he will escalate, but how.

2. The “Comprehensive Crime Bill” Trump demanded from congressional Republicans is likely to arrive this year.

Trump first floated the idea of a new crime bill in passing during his March 2025 address to Congress. In August, he claimed the House GOP was already working on it—surprising everyone, including the House GOP. The intent behind the package is straightforward: force Democrats to make politically fraught votes on crime. The issue has long been a liability for the party, and in the heat of this year’s midterm elections, fear of looking “soft on crime” could make Democrats fall in line, giving the measure the bipartisan boost it needs to pass.

Concrete information around the bill’s content, however, is scant. But based on Trump’s executive orders and rhetoric, it could well include provisions that attack bail reform, expand harsh sentencing, weaken police accountability, and clear the way for future National Guard deployments. (See Vera’s longer analysis for more predictions.)

Beyond the bill’s contents, a looming question is how Democrats will respond—and if they will again splinter over this issue. Last January, nearly 50 House Democrats joined the GOP in passing the Laken Riley Act; in September, more than 30 House Democrats voted with Republicans to pass rollbacks to juvenile justice reforms in Washington, DC. To entice Democrats (and potentially even some moderate Republicans) to vote against the bill, one possible counterstrategy would be to put forward an alternative set of policies that meaningfully advance safety, accountability, and justice.

3. Trump’s “War on Drugs” is reaching new heights, with drugs replacing weapons of mass destruction as the preferred justification for military intervention.

In December, Trump declared fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” (WMD). Much like the Bush administration did before him, Trump has begun wielding the language of WMDs to justify intervention in an oil-rich nation. The president launched a series of lethal attacks on alleged drug-smuggling vessels and even captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, all ostensibly in the name of fighting drug trafficking. 

As with Iraq’s supposed WMDs, drug trafficking is a hollow justification for Trump’s actions. Neither Venezuela nor the targeted boats account for a meaningful proportion of drugs entering the United States. For his part, Trump seems eager to admit that his real interest is Venezuela’s oil. Nevertheless, he is already wielding drugs as a justification for possible intervention in countries like Colombia and Mexico. 

This escalation did not emerge in a vacuum. Trump has long viewed drugs as an issue to handle through force rather than public health measures. Although he followed through on President Joe Biden’s popular plan to reschedule cannabis, Trump has slashed funding for drug treatment and directed the DOJ to seek the death penalty for drug traffickers.

As Trump ramps up his War on Drugs abroad, the escalation will inevitably reverberate at home. He already signed the deeply harmful HALT Fentanyl Act into law, and drugs are almost certain to factor into the so-called “Comprehensive Crime Bill” expected later this year. Even as Trump seems more focused on his military (mis)adventurism abroad than his war on safety and justice at home for the moment, the two are inextricably tied together.

4. As public disapproval of Trump’s extreme immigration agenda surges, we will see what mass deportations look like when supercharged by a $170 billion windfall—and just how far Republicans will go to defend policies that are rapidly losing public support.

Trump rode back into office on a potent wave of fearmongering about crime and immigration. In January 2025, polls showed that 55 percent of voters supported deporting all undocumented immigrants. Since then, that support has slipped into majority disapproval, likely propelled by particularly horrifying stories like ICE shooting a number of people,  stranding kids alone at school after taking their parents into custody, and detaining U.S. citizens. Recent events like the ICE officers killing Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis and shooting two other people in Oregon last week have deepened public outcry. Despite the risks inherent in protest and action at this moment, the public’s anger has increasingly translated into mobilization: protesters have taken to the streets across the country, and the advocacy organization Indivisible says more than 40,000 people joined a rapid-response call they hosted last week. 

Public opinion polling captures this growing disapproval. Last week, one YouGov poll found that 52 percent of U.S. adults surveyed disapprove (with 40 percent strongly disapproving) of how ICE is doing its job. Perhaps shockingly, a new Civiqs poll found that 42 percent of U.S. adults said they support abolishing ICE entirely (including 12 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of independents).

So far, however, the GOP’s response to this outrage is to double down—not back down. In the wake of last week’s shooting in Minneapolis, many Republican leaders stood firm with ICE. Despite damning video evidence, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) maintains that Renee Nicole Good was engaging in “domestic terrorism,” with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claiming she was “stalking and impeding” ICE agents. This is a well-worn GOP narrative to cast immigrants as “criminals” and immigration as an “invasion” from which the United States must protect itself. What is new here, however, is the administration, hand in hand with the GOP, attempting to use ICE shootings as an “us-versus-them” rallying cry to build support for its agenda and the people carrying it out.

Whether or not the public approves, Trump’s mass deportation agenda is barreling forward. The administration is still pushing for extreme policies like denaturalization, while GOP House representatives are trying to advance legislation that would codify Trump’s executive orders and go even further with a full freeze on immigration. As of October 2025, ICE was using more than 120 new detention facilities than the same time period one year prior. By the end of 2025, the average number of people in detention daily was 78 percent higher than the year prior. Still, it has insufficient detention beds and officers to meet its cruel goals. Even as GOP lawmakers seek to increase DHS funding for the upcoming year, the administration is rushing to make use of the $170 billion in funding for its immigration detention and enforcement agenda from last year’s budget bill, with plans like renovating industrial warehouses to detain upward of 80,000 immigrants.

Yet states and localities have been answering the call to protect their communities and mitigate the harm. Illinois, for example, recently passed a law banning immigration arrests near courthouses and allowing people to sue immigration agents who violate their constitutional rights. Lawmakers in states like New York and New Jersey—and cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles—are also rushing to enact protections for immigrants and avenues of recourse for when ICE violates people’s constitutional rights.

5. Massive federal funding cuts may imperil the ongoing historic crime decline.

Amid a year of near-limitless misery for criminal justice advocates, there was one perpetual bright spot: the ongoing, historic crime decline. Across the country, cities reported staggering crime stats at the end of the year: murders dropped 20 percent in New York City, 31 percent in Baltimore, and 29 percent in Chicago as compared to 2024, to name just a few cities. In addition to violent crime, property crime also plummeted, including much-discussed issues like retail theft and motor vehicle theft.

But there is reason to doubt that these declines will continue under the next three years of Trump. For one, some experts have noted that these kinds of steep declines do not persist year over year, and crime rates may eventually level off. For example, while Boston saw a 30 percent increase in homicides last year, that represented an increase from 22 to 30 murders, still a low total compared to previous decades and well below its 40 murders in both 2021 and 2022. 

More importantly, at some point, we will likely begin to see the fallout of Trump’s massive cuts to the programs that helped deliver the crime decline in the first place, including violence prevention programs, treatment services, affordable housing, and health care.

Facts won’t stop Trump from taking credit for crime declines and advantage of any potential upticks. In December, he declared that he would revisit National Guard deployments “when crime begins to soar again.” We know that he has little interest in the reality of crime—even proclaiming that the National Guard drove down crime in Portland (to “almost no crime”) and Chicago last year, despite never fully deploying in either city. All this false rhetoric only adds to the urgency of continuing to trumpet the crime decline and the factors behind it before bad actors attempt to weaponize potentially inevitable fluctuations in crime rates to push forward another wave of destructive “tough-on-crime” policies.