Donald Trump’s administration quietly abandoned more than 23,000 criminal cases within the first six months of his presidency, including 11,000 within Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first month in office alone, according to a sweeping analysis from ProPublica.
While the Department of Justice retreated from thousands of cases — from drug trafficking and terrorism to fraud, money laundering and white-collar crimes — federal prosecutors launched 32,000 new immigration-related cases, nearly triple the amount pursued under Joe Biden’s administration, the investigation found.
Among the cases shut down by Trump’s Justice Department were investigations into alleged cryptocurrency fraudsters, nursing homes accused of patient abuse, and nearly 1,000 cases concerning fraud and abuse of federal programs and federal contracts despite pledges from Trump and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department told the outlet that the historic number of declined cases follows “an effort to clean, remediate, and validate data in U.S. Attorneys’ case management system,” including a review of all pending criminal cases opened prior to the 2023 fiscal year.
“This Department of Justice remains committed to investigating and prosecuting all types of crime to keep the American people safe, and the number of declinations is a direct result of our efforts to run the agency in a more efficient manner,” the person told ProPublica.
The revelations also follow the president’s historic number of pardons for white-collar criminals and political allies accused of fraud, bribery and corruption after Trump campaigned on ending what he called the “politicization” of the Justice Department under his predecessor.
In more than a dozen cases, Trump issued pardons for people who were prosecuted or convicted within his first and second terms, only to unravel those cases entirely within months after returning to the White House.
The administration has instead shifted an enormous amount of federal firepower into immigration, diverting federal law enforcement agencies into pursuing immigration arrests and collaborating with the Department of Homeland Security even as the administration purged the DOJ of career prosecutors and investigators.
With that diminished fleet, and with a more explicit focus on immigration-related cases, Bondi’s Justice Department declined to prosecute thousands of cases that were considered priorities during Trump’s campaign, ProPublica found.
The Justice Department dropped nearly 5,000 drug cases including trafficking and money laundering, and more than 1,300 cases involving terrorism and national security.
Before Trump deployed federal immigration agents into Minnesota to root out alleged fraud in a surge that dovetailed with the president’s mass deportation efforts, the Justice Department shut down nearly 900 cases of federal fraud.
Dropped prosecutions included a case against a mortgage lender who allegedly defrauded the Federal Housing Administration, and more than 100 cases alleging health fraud, including an investigation into a nursing home, a national hospital chain, and one of the largest Medicaid-managed care companies, according to ProPublica.
Meanwhile, Trump has already pardoned more than 1,600 people convicted of federal crimes since the beginning of his second administration, the majority of which were charged in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Virtually every rioter involved in what was the Justice Department’s largest-ever investigation were granted clemency.
The majority of other pardons involved public fraud and white-collar crimes.
And while he accuses elected officials of committing crimes and demands the imprisonment of his political enemies, Trump preemptively pardoned nearly 80 people involved in his own efforts to overturn election results.
Though the Justice Department has radically shifted its focus to immigration, with operations that have cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, federal judges are repeatedly ruling against the administration’s efforts in court.
Federal judges have ruled more than 7,000 times against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in recent months, finding that the agency illegally arrested immigrants without giving them the chance to prove they could safely remain out of detention and stay in their communities while their cases played out.
Government lawyers in many of those cases didn’t even offer a counterargument when challenged. Instead, federal officials have agreed to let immigrants have bond hearings or release them from detention, citing a lack of legal arguments or relevant documents they could use to support their imprisonment.
Since Trump took office, immigrants have filed more than 26,000 emergency lawsuits seeking their release from ICE custody — more than the number filed in the last three administrations combined.
The avalanche of legal challenges in response to the swift arrests and detentions of immigrants has overwhelmed the Justice Department and court dockets across the country — and federal judges are routinely reprimanding government lawyers for “sloppy” mistakes and failing to keep up with court orders.
Judges have argued that it’s a crisis of the administration’s own making.
