Three years ago, Jessica was struggling with drug addiction and homelessness.
"I was stranded in Atlanta, and I got into some trouble," she says. NPR is not using her last name because she is worried about the stigma of having a criminal record.
She was charged with possession of marijuana, identity fraud and forgery. Her bail was set at more than $6,000, and she couldn't pay. She ended up in jail for two months, away from her two young daughters.
"I didn't have any family to bond me out. At that point in my life, I had already kind of burned a lot of bridges," she says. "You feel like nobody out there cares about you. It's something I never want to experience again."
At that point, Jessica had three paths ahead of her. The first: Stay in jail. That outcome is common: Most people in pre-trial detention in the U.S. are there because they can't afford bail.
The second: Use a commercial bail bond company, which will pay bail in exchange for a nonrefundable fee, often 10 percent of the full bail amount.
The third: Receive help from a community bail fund. These groups use donations to pay bail, for free, for people who can't.
That last avenue is how Jessica got out, and began to turn her life around. She moved into a sober living house and reconnected with her daughters. Now, she works at a mental health and substance abuse treatment program.
Bail reform rollbacks
Community bail funds are part of a larger movement to reform the practice of cash bail across the country. According to a 2024 report by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, at least eight states have passed legislation since 2020 aimed at reforming bail — things like requiring judges to impose the least restrictive conditions and eliminating cash bail either entirely or for low-level offenses.
But as efforts to reform bail increase, so does the backlash against them. New York, for instance, rolled back much of its bail reform efforts just a few years after it passed them. And on Monday, President Trump weighed in on social media, calling bail reform a "complete disaster" and asserting that crime in U.S. cities "started to significantly rise" when reforms passed.
Violent crime did rise in 2020 and 2021, but it has fallen over the last three years. Regarding Trump's assertions, the White House pointed NPR to a 2022 analysis done by the district attorney's office in Yolo County, Calif., which found that most of the 595 people released there without bail during the study period committed new crimes. However, another 2024 study by the Brennan Center for Justice looked at 33 cities across the country, and found bail reform did not increase crime rates.
Community bail funds have also faced increased criticism in recent years – in part because they're more common than they used to be.
"Following the 2020 protests, there was a lot of momentum around charitable bail payments to support people who were protesting police brutality," says Erin George, national director of policy for The Bail Project, a nonprofit that has helped release more than 30,000 people from jails nationwide, including Jessica.
In 2015, there were only about a dozen community bail funds in the U.S., according to the National Bail Fund Network. After 2020, there were more than 100.
That surge has led to a backlash from lawmakers — nearly all Republicans — to demand those funds be more closely watched, often citing public safety concerns.
But proponents of the community funds say the calls for more regulation are a political attack on a lifeline community members can offer one another – and on an alternative to cash bail that, advocates say, prove it doesn't need to exist.
They say the funds help people who can't otherwise afford it return home as their case plays out in court, without a financial burden.
Adding restrictions to community bail funds
Since 2020, more than a dozen state legislatures and Congress have introduced bills to restrict or regulate community bail funds.
At least four states — including Texas, Indiana, Georgia and Kentucky — have adopted laws restricting the use of bail funds, like adding more reporting requirements, saying the funds cannot be used for people charged with a violent crime, and limiting how many people a group can bail out in a given year, though that law is being challenged in court.
Although many of these laws passed during the Biden administration, Pilar Weiss, who runs the National Bail Fund Network, says it's troubling that this backlash is in full swing at a time when many people are protesting the second Trump administration.
"Community bail funds work as an expression of human solidarity to free people every day, as well as during moments of mass protest," says Weiss who added that the laws introduced and passed in various states to restrict community bail funds feel to her like part of a "very intentional attack on solidarity across communities."
The impact of community bail funds is small, she says. They can't come close to bailing out everyone around the country who can't afford to pay for their own release. Many are volunteer-run, and increased regulation mandated by states could make it hard for some to function, says Mike Dunn of the Emergency Release Fund, a charitable bail organization in New York.
"There's these kinds of hurdles you have to jump through now to be able to be a charitable bail organization. You know, they don't make it easy," he says.
If fewer bail funds existed, Dunn says, more people would stay in jail, often in poor conditions, away from work, school and family.
Jeff Clayon, executive director of the American Bail Coalition, which represents commercial bail bond companies, says much of the opposition is about safety.
During the 2024 presidential election, for instance, conservatives criticized Kamala Harris for tweeting support in 2020 for the Minnesota Freedom Fund. Two people the fund bailed out were later convicted of murder. At the time, a spokesperson for the fund, Noble Frank, said the nonprofit had paid bail for nearly 3,000 people and few had committed violent crimes.
Still, Clayton says, given the amount of money flowing through the funds, he believes they should be more heavily regulated.
"You do it charitable, you do it for profit, you still need to have a bail license in order to do that, and regulatory oversight where they can prohibit you from acting as a bondsman if there's abuses or for some reason you're stealing funds," he says.
He pointed to one criminal case in New York, where the head of a mutual aid group was indicted for allegedly using bail money for personal expenses.
"If you're going to operate in the criminal justice system, I don't really think it's that onerous," Clayton says, of more regulations.
But Erin George, of the Bail Project, says a key impact bail funds have had is showing that it's safe and effective to release people from pre-trial detention: According to the organization, the people they've helped release show up for more than 90 percent of their court dates.
"It makes a data-driven, evidence-based case that we should really be looking at our cash bail systems and laws," George says. "And that cuts at the financial bottom line of commercial bail bond companies."
Some bail funds are now thinking more broadly about the system as a whole.
For instance, the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which received an influx of tens of millions of dollars during the 2020 protests against police brutality, announced in May that it is pivoting away from paying bail to instead advocate for an end to cash bail altogether.
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