Since Vice President Kamala Harris announced her 2024 bid for president, the Trump-Vance campaign has sought to reignite false accusations that she is somehow responsible for bailing dangerous people out of jail. Specifically, in a series of misleading tweets stoking racist fears, the Trump-Vance campaign released the photos of multiple people who had been arrested, and some acquitted, for violent charges and then made the claim that Harris “raised money” to bail them out of jail. Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) has gone on to claim that during the mass protests following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, “Kamala Harris was helping to bail the rioters and looters out of jail,” despite the fact that three out of the five cases cited by the Trump-Vance campaign were arrests for offenses unrelated to the protests.
The truth is that Vice President Harris’ approach to bail is a practical one: She believes that safety, not wealth, should govern who is released and who is detained pretrial.
Harris did not raise money to bail “dangerous criminals” out of jail
The grossly misleading claims that Harris “raised money” to bail specific people, including protesters who participated in the nationwide 2020 demonstrations against police violence, out of jail is based on a tweet from more than four years ago—before Harris was vice president.
Despite evidence finding that 93 percent of all the 2020 protests were peaceful, Republicans weaponized these protests to justify a “tsunami” of bills to target and increase penalties for peaceful protestors across the country. In fact, a 2021 analysis by The Guardian revealed that the majority of charges brought against protestors were ultimately dropped, dismissed, or not filed. In one extreme case, a Maricopa County, Arizona, prosecutor was forced to resign due to her unethical handling of protest-related cases; she charged protestors with gang charges, but it was later discovered that the bureau in charge of the cases “repeatedly presented false information and testimony.”
Amid this backdrop, Kamala Harris shared information about the Minnesota Bail Fund, tweeting: “If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.” First, it is important to note that Harris had no involvement in deciding who the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) would give funds to and neither Harris nor MFF played a role in determining who the judge decided was safe to have bail set for them. Second, Harris was calling for support to help secure the release of peaceful protesters who were wrongfully caught up in mass arrests, not the specific release of people accused of dangerous crimes, as the Trump-Vance campaign would have Americans believe.
Bail funds decrease injustice in the pretrial process
Bail funds are an antidote to a system that uses money as a poor proxy for safety. Often, they are nonprofit organizations that use donations to pay bail for people who would otherwise remain incarcerated because they cannot afford bail. Unlike profit-driven commercial bail companies that charge people high fees and trap them into predatory contracts in exchange for bailing them out, nonprofit bail funds do not charge their clients and provide additional support services that can improve safety by meeting the underlying needs that may have led to arrest in the first place.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund is one such bail fund that has saved more than 2,500 people from unjust jailing.
Harris’ practical approach to bail
For years, Kamala Harris has been a champion of good policies that put safety and justice over money. The comments of former President Donald Trump and Sen. Vance aim to paint her as someone who puts dangerous people back on the streets, which stands in stark contrast to Harris’ record as a prosecutor, where she worked to ensure accountability for violent crime. As Harris knows from her time as a district attorney, “the difference between sitting in jail or not is how much money you have.”
That is why, as senator, she went on to co-sponsor the bipartisan Pretrial Integrity and Safety Act of 2017 with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). Though Trump and Vance try to paint Harris as “radically liberal” for wanting to reform these harmful practices, the reality could not be further from the truth; this legislation sought to replace arbitrary, wealth-based pretrial practices with individualized assessments to ensure that safety, not money, determines who is incarcerated pretrial.
Harris is not a “pro-criminal extremist” for believing, like most of us, that money should never determine one’s access to justice.
Reforms such as this have been successfully implemented across the country. For example, Illinois has done away with cash bail altogether, while other jurisdictions, such as New Jersey; Harris County, Texas; and Washington, D.C., have heavily limited its use. While some continue to make baseless claims that these policies are somehow bad for safety, a recent study analyzing outcomes from 33 jurisdictions across the country—22 of which have implemented some kind of bail reform—found “there is no evidence linking bail reform to changes in crime rates.”
Conclusion
At the end of the day, cash bail is a dangerous and unjust aspect of the criminal legal system that is in desperate need of reform. Harris is not a “pro-criminal extremist” for believing, like most of us, that money should never determine one’s access to justice.