An administration measures its commitment to justice by how many people it can put on death row, and the targets look exactly like the targets always have.

"The American public has made a very, very decisive turn away from the death penalty during the last 20 years."

— Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center

Less than halfway through his second term, Donald Trump's Department of Justice has authorized more death penalty prosecutions than in his entire first four years in office. According to figures compiled by The Intercept from legal records and DOJ data, prosecutors have moved to seek the death penalty against at least 42 defendants in 34 cases since Trump returned to the White House. His first term produced roughly 38 capital authorizations over four full years.

The numbers tell only part of the story. More than 70 percent of the defendants are people of color, most of them Black. Many of the new authorizations originated in places where the death penalty has been abolished at the state level, including New Mexico, Colorado, and Maryland, as well as in jurisdictions with no history of capital punishment, like the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The push began in January 2025, when Trump issued an executive order proclaiming his administration would "pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use." The order was framed as a rebuke to President Joe Biden, who commuted 37 death sentences before leaving office, leaving just three people on federal death row. Trump took to Truth Social on Christmas Day, wrongly calling the commutations pardons and telling the freed prisoners to "GO TO HELL!"

A month later, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo directing prosecutors to seek death wherever possible. She instructed them to prioritize cases involving law enforcement killings, gang members, international drug crimes, and undocumented immigrants. Bondi also ordered the DOJ to review every decision the Biden administration made to decline seeking the death penalty, effectively turning a decades-long de facto moratorium on federal capital prosecution into an open season.

Translation: Bondi was treating the Justice Department like a grievance list, retroactively overruling her predecessor's judgment on who deserved to live.

Bondi's attempt to convert Biden-era "no-seeks" into capital prosecutions has been mostly unsuccessful. Of hundreds of cases reviewed, prosecutors filed a notice of intent against 15 defendants who had previously been told they would not face the death penalty. One by one, presiding judges struck down the authorizations, with several scolding prosecutors for their ham-fisted efforts. Three cases remain where the government continues fighting to move forward despite Biden's DOJ declining to seek death.

Bondi was eventually replaced by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who made clear he intended to continue the push. In April 2026, Blanche released a 48-page report titled "Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty." The document cast Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland, as an outlier among attorneys general and devoted little space to Trump's own authorization record, avoiding entirely its mostly failed attempts to reverse Biden's decisions.

Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, described the report as reading more like "a campaign website instead of a measured legal document by a government agency."

The administration has also been changing how executions are carried out. In April 2026, Blanche instructed the Bureau of Prisons to modify the federal execution protocol to include firing squads, electrocution, and nitrogen gas asphyxiation alongside lethal injection. The stated rationale was supply chain instability for lethal injection drugs, but the practical effect is to widen the menu of state-sanctioned killing and signal that the government is prepared to kill people however it can.

Trump's first-term execution spree carried out 13 federal prisoners in the final months of 2020 and 2021, the first federal executions in nearly two decades. The racism of those killings was briefly visible to the public. Orlando Hall was sentenced by an all-white jury in Texas. The prosecutor who sent co-defendants Brandon Bernard and Christopher Vialva to death row told reporters that people considered him "crazy" for allowing a single Black man to serve on their jury.

That Trump's second term looks nearly identical in this regard is not a surprise. It is confirmation that the federal death penalty was never colorblind to begin with.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, from 1989 through June 2024, 73 percent of capital defendants authorized for federal prosecution were people of color. Trump's current authorizations track almost exactly with that figure. In Maryland, which has sent only one person to federal death row since the late 1980s, DOJ prosecutors have authorized capital prosecutions against more than 30 people, the majority Black and the rest Latino. In the Eastern District of Missouri, four authorizations were filed since last year, all against Black defendants.

The federal death penalty operates largely out of public view. Most authorizations never lead to a trial, let alone a death sentence. Maher noted that juries across the country are increasingly refusing to impose death, even when prosecutors seek it. "Those are American juries that are making different decisions now," she said. "Twenty years ago, we had five times the number of new death sentences than we had last year."

At least a third of Trump's second-term defendants have already seen the death penalty taken off the table, whether through judicial rulings, DOJ withdrawals, or guilty pleas. Twenty-seven defendants currently face capital trials. With Blanche, who served as Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer before becoming acting attorney general, still driving the prosecutions, there is no reason to expect a slowdown.

The question is not whether these authorizations represent a departure from past practice. They do not. They are an acceleration of a system that has always disproportionately targeted Black and Brown defendants, now wrapped in the personal animus of a president who conflates clemency with criminality and measures his legacy in body counts.

The federal death penalty was never about justice. It was always about who the government decided was disposable. Trump is simply more honest about it.

trump, death penalty, justice department, race