Keeping Violent Offenders Off Our Streets Act of 2025

Floor Speech

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Mr. FITZGERALD. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 1275, I call up the bill (H.R. 6260) to amend title 18, United States Code, to prohibit fraud in connection with posting bail, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.

The Clerk read the title of the bill.

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Mr. FITZGERALD. 6260.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 6260, the Keeping Violent Offenders Off Our Streets Act of 2025.

The bill defines the posting of cash bail by a corporate, nonprofit, or for-profit entity as engaged in the business of insurance, subjecting them to Federal insurance laws and our criminal fraud statutes.

The use of crowdsourcing for posting bail has long been scrutinized by the courts, now as a way to disguise the true source of the funds. That is because if there is little or no relationship between the defendant and those supplying the money, the bail money provides no incentive to prevent the defendant from simply fleeing the jurisdiction. This is especially true if the money does not have to be paid back.

While crowdsourcing funds is generally illegal, the use of charitable bail funds remains legal in most States. Charitable bail funds generally flew under the radar until 2020, when the George Floyd riots caused revenues to balloon, thanks to solicitations from celebrities and some politicians.

What used to be a small, community-based organization that helped post bail for nonviolent misdemeanors has grown into a multimillion- dollar industry.

For example, the Minnesota Freedom Fund saw revenues increase by 18,000 percent between 2019 and 2020. In a similar situation, The Bail Project saw its contributions triple in 2020 to nearly $42 million.

Perhaps more alarming, what was intended to help bail out low-level, nonviolent protesters has instead been used to release violent felony offenders back into the streets with little or no oversight.

In 2021, for example, the Minnesota Freedom Fund released a domestic abuser back onto the street. Two weeks later, the man, George Howard, was charged with second-degree murder for a road rage incident.

Michael Dewitt of Louisville, Kentucky, was bailed out by The Bail Project in February 2021 after being arrested on multiple charges. Two months later, he was arrested for murder.

Shawn Michael Tillman, 3 weeks after having bail paid by the Minnesota Freedom Fund, murdered a man at a light rail station in Saint Paul and is now serving a life sentence for that crime.

Mr. Speaker, the list continues to go on and on. According to an investigation conducted by CNN, in Hennepin County, Minnesota, the Minnesota Freedom Fund has bailed out at least 65 defendants who were awaiting trial on felony charges involving violence, physical threats, or sex crimes.

Similarly, in Indiana, of the roughly 1,000 defendants released on bail supplied by The Bail Project between 2019 and 2021, 24 percent had previously been charged with a crime of violence, and 35 percent were accused of felony charges and had a previous charge of at least one crime of violence.

Because these funds are crowdsourced, there is no incentive for the defendants to show up for their court date. Guess what. Many of them don't.

Again according to the network CNN, nearly 42 percent of roughly 500 defendants bailed out by the Minnesota Freedom Fund later failed to appear at one or more court hearings between 2021 and 2022.

Commercial bail companies, by comparison, had a failure to appear rate of only 22 percent, so it is working in the private sector. During that same period, there are new numbers that demonstrate that this trend will continue. This is why many States have begun regulating the use of charitable bail funds.

Georgia, for example, limits the amount of cash bonds a charitable bail fund can pay in a given year. Indiana prohibits the use of charitable bail funds for posting bail for violent felony offenders. Unfortunately, a State-by-State patchwork is now developing, and that will obviously not solve this problem.

That is why we introduced the Keeping Violent Offenders Off Our Streets Act of 2025. This bill makes a very small but important change to our criminal code to define bail bonds as an insurance product--that is it--thereby subjecting it to the same Federal background check and regulatory requirements as those of for-profit bail agencies under the Federal Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1994.

This change would also bring charitable bail funds under State insurance regulation, giving States the ability to better scrutinize the use of these funds.

Mr. Speaker, let me be clear. This bill does not outlaw the use of charitable bail funds, nor does it regulate the posting of cash bail by family and friends of the accused. This bill merely says that if you are operating as a not-for-profit with the purpose of posting cash bail, you should be subjected to the same regulation and oversight requirements as those operating as a for-profit entity.

This will bring needed oversight to organizations that for years have gone unregulated while ensuring accountability of these funds by subjecting them to Federal insurance fraud statutes if they misappropriate funds or misrepresent the use of these funds in any financial reports.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all Members to vote ``yes'' on the bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I will just say that a number of the issues that were raised by the ranking member are issues that I thought we addressed in the committee. We talked to a number of Members and some district attorneys, certainly prosecutors and public defenders. Again, this is a situation where these sites are created, donations pour in nationwide to fund some of these, not only the crowdsourced funds but also additional dollars that, quite honestly, are very difficult to track.

We thought this would be a simple solution to it. I think there is enough support for it.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I have no idea what the gentlewoman is speaking about. This would have no effect on any of the charitable situations that she just described.

As for judges, I think if my colleagues wanted to debate jurisdictions, prosecutors, and judges setting weak bail policies, we can certainly have that discussion. I think that is a separate discussion from what would be appropriate for the bill before us.

Just this morning, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing on a Fairfax County Commonwealth's attorney who seems to care far less about what crime a defendant may have committed than whether they are in the country illegally. The prosecutors apparently have a history of offering these sweetheart deals, which we are all very aware of.

You can go across the country--New York, California, Illinois, Maryland, it doesn't matter. All these policies that restrict judges and prosecutors from imposing constraints on criminals are what we should be talking about.

This all came about and I got involved in it because of what happened in my own State and in my own district when a judge released a known violent offender, and the individual proceeded to drive through the Waukesha Christmas Parade and killed six innocent bystanders.

The best thing we can do is try to check the system to make sure that it is working properly, and that is what this bill aims to do.

I find it hard to believe that people donate to these funds knowing that funds will go specifically to bail out somebody who is a violent criminal. Quite honestly, that is another issue, I believe, that people oftentimes are misled or don't even know what they are donating to actually fund at this point.

I would hope that this would be given a little bit further consideration on its face, rather than trying to judge it based on many different situations that, quite honestly, I don't believe exist. They are the same types of red herrings that we have been hearing since the day that we introduced the bill.

Mr. Speaker, again, I think the gentleman from Texas' comments are not specifically directed at this legislation. There is a larger frustration maybe with the bail bond industry, but certainly that is not something that we need to be concerned with here.

The criticism about bail funds and how low-income individuals and individuals of color are handled, the bill in no way prohibits the use of charitable bail organizations or limits their use. The bill merely subjects them to the same level of scrutiny we apply to for-profit bail companies.
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Mr. FITZGERALD. Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close and reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, this bill before us will ensure accountability for charitable bail funds that break the law. It is that simple. We are not trying to eliminate any crowdsourcing. We are just trying to make sure that there is some monitoring going on here. We know these funds have bailed out violent felony offenders in the past and we have a responsibility, or these organizations that claim a tax-exempt status, to ensure funds are being spent appropriately.

H.R. 6260 will allow States to enact licensing requirements for entities that post bail on behalf of defendants which will bring needed scrutiny.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairman Jordan for his leadership on this issue and again urge passage of H.R. 6260.

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