KEEPING VIOLENT OFFENDERS OFF OUR STREETS ACT OF 2025

On 2026-05-14, Representative Lateefah Simon (D-CA-12) delivered a floor speech titled "KEEPING VIOLENT OFFENDERS OFF OUR STREETS ACT OF 2025" in the House.

KEEPING VIOLENT OFFENDERS OFF OUR STREETS ACT OF 2025

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 82 (Thursday, May 14, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 82 (Thursday, May 14, 2026)] [House] [Pages H3474-H3480] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] KEEPING VIOLENT OFFENDERS OFF OUR STREETS ACT OF 2025 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. The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 1275, the amendment in the nature of a substitute recommended by the Committee on the Judiciary, printed in the bill, is adopted and the bill, as amended, is considered read. The text of the bill, as amended, is as follows: H.R. 6260 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This Act may be cited as the ``Keeping Violent Offenders Off Our Streets Act of 2025''. SEC. 2. FRAUD IN CONNECTION WITH POSTING BAIL. Section 1033(f)(1)(A) of title 18, United States Code, is amended by inserting before the comma the following: ``(including the posting of monetary bail, criminal bail bonds, and Federal immigration bail bonds)''. The SPEAKER pro tempore. The bill, as amended, shall be debatable for 1 hour equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on the Judiciary or their respective designees. The gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Fitzgerald) and the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin) each will control 30 minutes. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Fitzgerald). general leave Mr. FITZGERALD. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and to insert extraneous material on H.R. 6260. The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Wisconsin? There was no objection. Mr. FITZGERALD. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. 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. [[Page H3475]] 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. {time} 1300 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. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to the Keeping Violent Offenders Off Our Streets Act, which is a truly strange bill. The bill, first of all, refers to violent offenders, but it is unclear exactly why. It applies to all offenders. In any event, it would redefine the business of insurance to include the posting of monetary bail, criminal bail bonds, and Federal immigration bail bonds. It would accomplish this dramatic reclassification for the purposes of prosecuting and punishing community bail funds as a form of criminal insurance fraud. Only in surreal MAGA Washington would someone think to change the definition of insurance fraud to include the posting of bail and bail bonds. I can't even begin to reconstruct the giant mental leaps that must have been used to get to this fallacy. This week is National Police Week, and as we do every year, we recognize and honor the men and women who put their lives on the line for us to protect our communities. Our colleagues have vaguely and inscrutably billed this legislation as pro-police, although they have yet to show how it would support the police or address the articulated needs of police officers anywhere in the country. The true aim of H.R. 6260, apparently, is to discourage and destroy not-for-profit bail funds that raise money for people who cannot afford to pay bail for themselves. These groups try to address the basic injustice that results when wealthy people can walk free while poor people are held in jail pending trial for no reason other than their inability to pay, which is why the Federal system, as I was arguing in our last bill, eliminates money from the equation entirely and says that the only question is whether a person presents a flight risk or danger to the community. Now, my distinguished colleague, the author of the legislation, ties the beginning of these bail funds I think he said to 2020 with the killing of George Floyd. Actually, the history of these funds goes back a lot further than that. It really begins during the period of abolitionism in the Civil War when various people were being jailed for either assisting enslaved people in the Underground Railroad or being arrested for their attempts to interfere with the fugitive slave law. In any event, money was raised to get people out of jail for those purposes. That lasted through the Civil War, and it went into the Reconstruction period as well, because we know that the criminal justice system in the South was turned into an instrument of incarceration and domination and reimposing discipline on the freed slave population. That is what they were using the criminal justice system for, and so people throughout the country were raising money to try to 

Referenced legislation: HRES1275, HRES1275, HR6260