Civil rights and access to justice advocates were tested on multiple fronts in 2025, as President Donald Trump's return to office ushered in sweeping policy shifts that reshaped immigration enforcement, federal criminal justice funding, voting rights litigation and the administration of the death penalty.

From aggressive immigration arrests that courts said likely crossed constitutional lines, to the mass cancellation of federal grants supporting public safety and reentry programs, to renewed U.S. Supreme Court scrutiny of the Voting Rights Act and a surge in executions, the year was marked by a series of developments with far-reaching consequences.

Experts told Law360 how these events unfolded, the legal battles they triggered, and what they revealed about the current state of civil rights and access to justice advocacy.

Grant Cancellations Axed Criminal Justice Programs

In April, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a mass letter to hundreds of nonprofits receiving federal grants from the Office of Justice Programs informing them that grants they had already been awarded wouldn't be paid out. The justification included in the letter was that the work the organizations performed did not further the department's priorities.

The grant cancellations, which totaled about $820 million initially, affected 554 organizations across 48 states. The cuts impacted a wide range of areas — violence reduction, policing, prosecution, victim services, juvenile justice, child protection, substance use and mental health treatment, and corrections research.

Some of the nonprofits fought back, either through an appeals process within the DOJ or by suing. Those efforts were mostly unsuccessful. The litigation was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, while only 13 succeeded in getting their grants restored. All told, about $500 million in grants were effectively slashed.

"It was really across-the-board kind of cuts," said Amy Solomon, a former U.S. assistant attorney general who oversaw the Office of Justice Programs during the Biden administration and is now a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice. "It was just a broad swath of grant cuts that impacted a huge range of issues focused on public safety, juvenile justice and victim services."

Community violence intervention initiatives, known as CVI, were disproportionately impacted by the grant cuts.

Over the previous three years, under Solomon's supervision, the DOJ approved $300 million in CVI programs. Under the leadership of Attorney General Pam Bondi, the DOJ canceled more than half of the grants geared toward those programs, a total worth of $158 million.

Solomon said the cuts targeted CVI programs run by nonprofits, while sparing those run by cities and states.

"These groups were doing really important work on the ground," Solomon said. "They were building. They were professionalized. Seeing their teams, they were expanding, and really, you know, had the credibility and expertise in their jurisdictions to save lives, and they were completely cut off."

Solomon said the grant cancellations undermine what she described as a national movement that took off in 2022 with the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a federal law that sought to address gun violence and included federal investments in school-based mental health and violence prevention programs.

"These nonprofits are a really integral part of the public safety infrastructure and communities," Solomon said. "These are the people who victims and people in some of the hard-hit neighborhoods and who have expertise and trust and credibility."

National nonprofits providing guidance on best practices in law also saw their DOJ grants canceled. They include organizations such as the Council of State Governments Justice Center, or CSG, which distributes federal funds to reentry programs, and the National Criminal Justice Association, which serves as a liaison between federal and state, local and tribal governments on criminal justice issues.

Other organizations providing free technical assistance to judges, courts, probation officers, correctional departments and juvenile justice practitioners also saw their grants cut.

The lack of technical assistance resulting from the grant cancellations will be felt in the day-to-day operations of the criminal justice system, Solomon said.

For instance, the CSG has for years run a national reentry resource center that helps jails and prisons plan the transition of formerly incarcerated people into society.

The center helped practitioners understand best practices when it came to accessing housing, substance abuse treatments or behavioral health interventions, which are needed to prevent recidivism. The center offers resources such as webinars, conferences, coaching, training, on-site visits by experts and data analysis in specific areas, but the cancellation of the grants means that support won't be available.

"It means that the field can't rely on that assistance anymore," Solomon said. "It's a very kind of quiet but significant loss."

Alleged Racial Profiling and 4th Amendment Violations in Immigration

On paper, the Trump administration's immigration crackdown shows up in statistics. There was a nearly 70% increase in noncitizens detained compared with the same period last year, with almost 74% of those in custody lacking any criminal convictions; a nearly 81% rise in criminal prosecutions of immigrants compared with a year ago; and more than 470,000 immigrants ordered deported by immigration judges through August.

But on the ground, the reality is more stark: masked agents making arrests in courthouses, people being separated from family members amid screams, and teams in tactical gear sweeping through urban neighborhoods seizing people on the spot.

On the streets, arrest decisions often appear to turn on individuals' appearance, the language they speak and where they happen to be.

Litigation in federal courts this year has highlighted practices by agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection that critics say amount to racial profiling, or that are otherwise unconstitutional.

On Dec. 2, U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction to a group of noncitizen plaintiffs, concluding that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that federal immigration officials in Washington, D.C., were conducting warrantless civil immigration arrests without making individualized probable-cause determinations of flight risk, as required by federal law.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, an officer making a civilian immigration arrest without a warrant can only do so with probable cause to believe that the person who is being arrested is both in the United States unlawfully and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained. In practice, that means that the officer must make a decision to arrest on the spot, based only on facts the officer knows about that person, in what should be an objective assessment.

Following Trump's Aug. 11 declaration of a purported state of emergency in Washington, D.C., the ACLU of DC began receiving reports of a wave of immigration arrests that appeared to have been carried out in defiance of the law's requirements.

According to a class action complaint filed in federal court at the end of September, masked and armed federal agents in plainclothes flooded the streets of D.C. and began arresting residents who appeared Latino without warrants and probable cause.

José Escobar Molina, a longtime D.C. resident with valid temporary protected status, was arrested by federal agents in August while he was heading to work, despite having lawful authorization to be in the United States, according to the complaint.

Aditi Shah, an attorney with the ACLU, told Law360 that the plaintiffs' experiences show that officers systematically failed to ask questions about personal circumstances, community ties, or legal status that could have formed the legal basis for arrests.

According to the complaint, Escobar Molina was walking from his apartment toward his work truck when two vehicles pulled up and agents in plainclothes detained him without asking for identification, immigration documents or information about his ties to the community. He was handcuffed and taken into custody without an explanation, the suit says.

Escobar Molina was held overnight at an ICE processing center in Chantilly, Virginia, where a supervisor later determined that he had valid temporary protected status, a form of protection from deportation for people hailing from countries facing conflict, disaster or extraordinary conditions, and ordered his release the following day. By then, the suit says, he had already spent hours in detention and experienced physical discomfort and lingering fear as a result of the encounter. In the aftermath, he changed his daily routines and reported ongoing concern about being stopped again, as well as fear for his U.S.-citizen children, whom he worried could be similarly targeted.

"Congress recognized that it's important to place limitations on when agents can just arrest people without a warrant," Shah said. "It's a really important safeguard against the government being able to simply apprehend and arrest and detain people indiscriminately."

In her order, Judge Howell emphasized that immigration violations are civil, not criminal.

"As a general rule, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain present in the United States," the judge wrote, quoting Supreme Court precedent. "Consequently, viewing all immigrants potentially subject to removal as criminals is, as a legal matter, plain wrong."

Earlier in the year, however, aggressive immigration enforcement practices received a legal blessing from the Supreme Court itself. A majority of the justices temporarily set aside a lower court order from July that had barred federal agents from using physical appearance and other race-linked indicators while making stops of suspected noncitizens.

In a concurring opinion to the order, which was part of the court's emergency docket, in which the justices rule on urgent requests with minimal written explanation, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that case law allows immigration agents to use race or ethnicity as some of the factors in making immigration stops. In his view, officers may conduct brief stops based on reasonable suspicion, a standard lower than probable cause, and that factors such as location, type of work, language ability and apparent ethnicity may be considered together, though not ethnicity alone.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that the stay effectively authorizes stops that sweep in large numbers of innocent people, including citizens, and forces visibly Latino individuals to carry proof of citizenship to avoid detention.

"We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job," Justice Sotomayor wrote in her opinion, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Critics say immigration officers' use of race and ethnicity during stops is a form of racial profiling that federal courts across the country have found unconstitutional.

Executions More Than Doubled, Driven by Florida

States executed 47 people in 2025, the highest number in 15 years, largely due to a surge in capital sentences carried out by Florida, which alone executed 19 people, according to an annual report published by the Death Penalty Information Center, or DPI. There were 25 executions nationwide in 2024. On Dec. 15, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles suspended the exe­cu­tion of Stacey Humphreys after canceling a clemen­cy hear­ing to which he was legally entitled. The state has until Dec. 24, when Humphreys' death warrant will expire, to carry out his execution.

The remarkable increase in executions, which interrupts a decadelong trend of fewer than 30 executions per year, comes as public support for the death penalty has fall­en to a five-decade low.

According to a Gallup poll published in October, 52% of Americans favor the death penal­ty, down one percentage point from last year, and the lowest level of support since 1972, according to the DPI report. The report described Florida as an outlier and called its execution surge "extreme." Only Texas executed more people in a single year, carrying out 24 of them in 2009.

The report noted that new death sentences remain near historic lows, with 22 this year. Executions took place in 12 states in 2025, mostly concentrated in Florida, Alabama, South Carolina and Texas, which carried out nearly three-quarters of them.

"The data show that the decisions of [Florida] Gov. [Ron] DeSantis and other elected officials are increasingly at odds with the decisions of American juries and the opinions of the American public," Robin Maher, DPI's executive director, said in a statement accompanying the report.

This year also saw states continue to adopt new methods of execution.

In March, Louisiana executed Jessie Hoffman Jr. by nitrogen gas suffocation, becoming the second state to use the method, after Alabama in January 2024. Alabama has since executed seven men using nitrogen gas, which is pushed into a person's lungs through a tight-fitting, industrial-grade mask, causing death by asphyxiation. Arkansas, Mississippi and Oklahoma have also authorized the method, but have yet to use it.

As states continue to face hurdles in obtaining lethal injection drugs, firing squads and electrocution are also on the table.

Race was also an important factor in the executions this year. Less than 17% of people executed in 2025 were sentenced to death for murdering a person of color. Victims were largely white and female.

The DPI report called attention to people who were executed despite possible intellectual disabilities.

On Aug. 5, Tennessee executed Byron Black, a man sentenced to death for a triple murder and whom the state conceded had an intellectual disability and should have been removed from death row.

Federal defenders had argued that executing Black would go against the U.S. Supreme Court's 2002 ruling in Atkins v. Virginia , which held that executing a person with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments. But the Supreme Court declined to step in to halt Black's lethal injection execution.

Also notable is that eight peo­ple exe­cut­ed in 2025 were under the age of 21 at the time of their crime, despite increasing acknowledgment from courts that brain devel­op­ment con­tin­ues well into a person's 20s.

Overall, the high court largely declined to get involved in death row litigation. The justices denied every request to stay an execution in 2025. In February, in a rare occurrence, the court granted a new trial for Richard Glossip, a man on Oklahoma's death row whose criminal case was mired by prosecutorial misconduct.

"Philosophical disagreement about the role of the court in death penalty cases was on full display this year," Maher of DPI told Law360. "The conservative majority turned away most applications and denied all stays of execution, even over the increasingly alarmed dissents of the court's liberal members."

Supreme Court Reopens Fight Over the Voting Rights Act

In Louisiana v. Callais , the U.S. Supreme Court is reconsidering the constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The VRA, a landmark federal law enacted in 1965 at the height of the civil rights movement, prohibits state and local governments from enacting voting laws that discriminate by race.

A decision on the case will come next year and has the potential to gut a powerful legal tool designed to root out tactics aimed at disenfranchising nonwhite voters.

Just in 2023, in Allen v. Milligan , the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the constitutionality of Section 2 while finding that an Alabama congressional map impermissibly packed many Black voters into a single district, a practice known as vote dilution.

Speaking at a recent American Bar Association webinar, Deuel Ross, the director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, called the court's decision to scrutinize the VRA "unfortunate" and said the decision was the "genesis for a lot of the redistricting wars that you're seeing now, and probably through 2026."

Ross is one of the Legal Defense Fund attorneys who, alongside the American Civil Liberties Union, sued on behalf of Black voters challenging Louisiana's congressional map in 2021. The voters won a preliminary injunction, but the Supreme Court stayed that ruling for the 2022 elections while waiting for its decision in Allen v. Milligan.

After the Milligan ruling, Louisiana redrew its map, adding a second majority-Black district, but not in the configuration plaintiffs proposed. Instead, the state drew a long district running from southeastern to northern Louisiana, apparently to target a Republican incumbent the governor at the time disliked, Ross said, stressing that the map was drawn for partisan, not racial, reasons.

"The Supreme Court has said for a long time that if you're drawing districts not based on race, but based on sort of partisan concerns primarily, then that is not necessarily unconstitutional," Ross said.

But a group of self-described non-Black voters later sued Louisiana in a different court. A three-judge panel quickly held that the new map with two majority-Black districts was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, saying the state had considered race too heavily by aiming for two majority-Black districts.

Legal Defense Fund intervened and the case went to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in the spring of the last term.

Instead of just issuing a decision on the Louisiana map, Ross said, the Supreme Court did something unusual: it ordered reargument, asking for briefing not only on Louisiana's plan but on whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act itself is constitutional, a surprise given that the Milligan ruling had upheld the same law's provisions two years earlier.

During oral arguments on Oct. 15, the court's conservative justices signaled an openness to limiting the VRA's reach.

"The fact that they wanted to hear reargument about it, rather than issuing an opinion about this Louisiana case, I think has set off a lot of alarm bells for the civil rights community," Ross said. "There's sort of a concern that the Supreme Court is going to do away with the broad protections of the Voting Rights Act in a way that would make it much easier for Democrats and Republicans to eliminate majority minority districts in a way that advances their political partisan concerns."

Experts say renewed scrutiny of Section 2 has been a major driver of efforts by states to redraw their congressional districts.

Speaking at the same ABA event, Nina Perales, the vice president of litigation for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, said Texas launched a redistricting "arms race" by calling a special session over the summer to draw a new congressional map that favors the GOP.

MALDEF sued the state in federal court, winning a preliminary injunction that would have prevented Texas from using the new map in the next election. But on Dec. 4, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Texas could move forward with its plan in an unsigned decision that is part of its controversial "shadow docket."

Missouri and North Carolina also redrew their congressional maps to help Republicans gain more seats. Indiana, Florida, Kansas and Ohio are also considering following suit. And through a ballot initiative in November spearheaded by Gov. Gavin Newsom, California allowed voters to sideline an independent redistricting commission and redrew its congressional map in a way that would favor Democratic candidates. All these fights will continue to play out well into 2026.

--Editing by Nicole Bleier.

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