Arlington Public Safety Threatened By Trump Funding Freeze: Prosecutor

ARLINGTON, VA — Public safety programs that work to reduce recidivism and help victims of violence will be threatened by the Trump Administration’s efforts to freeze federal grants and loans, according to Arlington’s top prosecutor.

“All of those seed pilot projects that are trying to look at things in the criminal justice system in a different way, and trying to find things that work better than the traditional incarceration system that we have … trying to develop tools to reduce recidivism, and trying to make our community safer, ultimately, are now gone,” said Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, during a webinar hosted by The Wren Collective on Tuesday.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected a Trump administration push to reinstate a sweeping pause on federal funding, a decision that comes after a judge found the administration had not fully obeyed an earlier order, according to the Associated Press.

The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision was the latest in a string of court losses that is increasingly frustrating top administration officials as it slows President Donald Trump’s wide-ranging agenda, AP said.

One of the grants affected by the freeze would be one Arlington County obtained via the Second Chance Act to start a pilot program with a community-based organization that specializes in helping individuals re-enter society.

“We took the principles of re-entry that worked and tried to apply them to people who were coming out of shorter jail sentences rather than long prison sentences, and trying to divert those cases, so that we can get people into community services more quickly,” Dehghani-Tafti said.

If the Trump Administration freeze were allowed to go forward, the re-entry program would likely end unless another source of funding were identified.

Another program funded with an Office of Violence Against Women grant was designed to find ways to reduce and prevent intimate partner violence in the community.

“The obvious consequence of that is that you have domestic violence victims who are not going to be reporting, because they don't want to report to the legal system,” Dehghani-Tafti said. “They're not even going to have this other avenue that we were trying to design for them to report and for them to get treatment and for healing.”

Entitled “The First Week: The Trump Impact on Criminal Justice,” the Wren Collective webinar focused on the Trump Administration’s actions in relation to public safety, such as mass pardons, immigration edicts and his death penalty executive order.

In addition to Dehghani-Tafti, the panel included Stephen Vladeck, professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center; and Angela Chang, director of the Youth Defense Division at the Hamilton County Public Defender. Nikki Baszynski from the Wren Collective served as the webinar’s moderator.

The Associated Press contributed to the reporting of this story.