ProPublica revealed on March 31, 2026 that the DOJ under Attorney General Pam Bondi quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of Trump's second term, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases. ProPublica, which examined two decades of DOJ data, found the increase was not the result of inheriting a larger caseload or more referrals.
In February 2025 alone, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, the most in a month since at least 2004. The DOJ declined more than 1,300 terrorism and national security cases, nearly twice what was typical at the start of recent new administrations, including just over 300 cases of material support to foreign terrorist organizations. It declined nearly 5,000 drug cases (45% above the average of the prior three new administrations) and more than 900 federal program or procurement fraud cases, about double the same period under Biden and Trump's first term.
Meanwhile, the department prosecuted 32,000 new immigration cases, nearly triple the number under Biden. The spike began when prosecutors were ordered in February 2025 to review every open case launched before October 2022; a memo described to ProPublica gave them 10 days, for a review one attorney said would typically take months. Former prosecutor Michael Gordon said, “The office was pushing us to close everything by a certain date so that when they had to report up to D.C. they had a low number of open cases.”
A DOJ spokesperson said the closures came from an effort to “clean, remediate, and validate data” and that “the number of declinations is a direct result of our efforts to run the agency in a more efficient manner.” Prosecutors interviewed by ProPublica, and an open letter from nearly 300 former DOJ employees, said the department is retreating from its mission to impartially uphold the rule of law and keep the country safe.
Correction (October 14, 2026): An earlier version said the 900-plus fraud and procurement declinations were three times the typical rate. ProPublica put them at about double; the threefold figure applies to a narrower category, major fraud against the U.S. It also said prosecutors called the 10-day review timeline impossible, and asserted that Americans are objectively less safe as a result. ProPublica reported one attorney saying such a review would typically take months, and the safety claim was our own conclusion, not a sourced finding; both have been revised. The title now says terrorism and national security cases, matching ProPublica's category. Two dead source links were replaced.