For more than a year, President Donald Trump has been threatening a “comprehensive crime bill,” though rarely with much specificity on either the makeup of the bill or the timeline to pass it. But the absence (so far) of the big bill Trump has been demanding does not mean that there won’t be any federal crime-related legislation this year. Smaller but still quite harmful criminal justice bills are making their way through Congress, with lawmakers in both parties on board, presumably in the hopes of boosting their reelection campaigns by once again turning to the tired “tough-on-crime” playbook.

On May 12, the House of Representatives passed the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act of 2025 (CORCA) with broad bipartisan support, and it will be taken up by the Senate soon, where it has backing from prominent moderate Democrats. The Senate also recently marked up the Federal Carjacking Enforcement Act, which would make more carjackings eligible for federal charges. While both bills involve real problems, they are based on faulty, outdated assessments and take the wrong approach to solving them: expanding federal penalties for local crimes, handing more power to politicized federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and pushing ineffective punishment over evidence-based solutions. In addition, the House passed bills that could imperil bail funds and that direct the attorney general to create a list of every jurisdiction that “permits cashless bail.”  

With summer recess approaching and multiple cabinet vacancies to fill, it’s unclear whether the Senate will actually pass these bills—but they loom as dangerous possibilities that will deepen mass incarceration and undermine civil liberties in the United States. 

CORCA would massively expand DHS’s power—at a moment when the agency is already out of control

CORCA makes Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of DHS, the center of a new national intelligence hub on retail theft, with vast surveillance and intelligence-gathering powers. CORCA would dramatically expand DHS’s role in domestic law enforcement, authorizing sweeping new authority to collect, analyze, and share the personal data of people in the United States with few meaningful civil liberties safeguards, no adequate oversight, and no accountability mechanisms. As Aiden Cotter, director of Federal Advocacy at Vera Action, stated: “CORCA is not a safety bill, it’s a surveillance bill.”

Cotter applauded the ten Democrats who did drop their prior support for CORCA after 40 organizations signed on to a letter opposing the bill. He urged the Senate “to reject CORCA and stop empowering DHS and ICE.”

Communities, businesses, and workers deserve real solutions to retail theft. But giving more power and surveillance authority to DHS is not the right answer. While CORCA is intended to address “organized retail crime,” it will inevitably sweep up people shoplifting because they are experiencing poverty. Serious efforts to reduce shoplifting, rather than just arresting and rearresting the same few people, would involve diversion programs and other forms of economic support. Meanwhile, addressing larger operations should involve stricter regulation of online retailers to discourage the reselling of stolen goods, targeted collaboration between local and federal law enforcement, and getting companies to invest more in retail staffing and training to improve in-store oversight and theft prevention.

Moreover, as devastating as the issue is for a small business, the extent of the retail theft crisis has been overstated: after sparking a wave of coverage with some eye-popping—and later retracted—numbers, the National Retail Federation’s own more recent analysis showed that the industry’s losses have remained steady for a decade. A recent Council on Criminal Justice analysis of 40 large U.S. cities shows that in 2025, shoplifting fell below pre-pandemic levels. 

The Federal Carjacking Enforcement Act would mean overcriminalization and overreach

In addition to already being a serious crime in every U.S. state and territory, carjacking is also already a federal crime, carrying serious penalties up to and including death. What the Federal Carjacking Enforcement Act would do is dramatically expand federal liability, making nearly every carjacking a federal offense.  

Under Trump, dating back to his first term, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been weaponized to attack immigrants and Democrat-run cities. A DOJ that has dropped a record number of criminal cases to focus on its war on immigrants and the president’s enemies should not be taking charge over the expertise of state and local judges and prosecutors who are already working to end the carjacking spike.

Thanks to that work, there’s no need for a federal solution to the problem to begin with. By last year, carjacking incidents had declined by 61 percent from their 2023 peak. In 2025, the average carjacking rate was 29 percent lower than pre-pandemic levels. Carjacking is a local crime, and state and local responses to it are already working.

Voters want real solutions, not posturing

As if the Senate needs further reason to reject these bills, it’s unlikely they would be the political winners their supporters imagine them to be. Moderate politicians are likely listening to advice that, despite Trump’s unpopularity (including on crime), they still need to get “tough” to win in November. But voters don’t actually want this approach; they want solutions that work to prevent crime and break its cycle. According to polling, many voters with “tough-on-crime" views support prevention-focused solutions like education and job training over more police and longer sentences.

Building safe communities by investing in them, making them more vibrant and livable, supporting the people in them with good schools, jobs, and affordable housing, and increasing treatment for mental health and substance use issues is both an effective crime deterrent and a very popular political program.

In contrast, these bills hand more power to wildly unpopular federal agencies who have abused public trust. A March poll found that 33 percent of people in the United States find DHS trustworthy, and just 28 percent trust the DOJ. Over the past year, Trump has shown people what “tough-on-crime" policies look like in action, and they don’t like it. Giving these agencies more access to our data and more control over local government will not make us safer—or win elections.

An approach that prioritizes preventing crime, responding to crisis, and stopping violence—like that laid out in Vera’s A New Federal Paradigm for Safety, Accountability, and Justice—is better politics and policy.