May 14, 2025

Thank you for your continued support of Minnesota Freedom Fund.  

After thoughtful reflection and careful analysis, we have made the difficult but necessary decision to shift our organizational focus toward achieving long-term, systemic impact. We will temporarily discontinue paying pretrial bails and bonds as of June 1, 2025. We will reevaluate our organizational impact and sustainability measures after one year.

We are committed to maintaining an open line of communication with trusted supporters like you, so that you can understand our reasoning, actively engage in the future direction of our organization, and help us set the record straight: Minnesota Freedom Fund is not going anywhere. We are digging in.

How did we reach this decision?

This strategic decision acknowledges the painful realities of the wealth-based system, and it is rooted in both philosophical and fiscal considerations. 

Philosophically, we have come to a hard truth: We cannot bail and bond our way out of the harmful systems of pretrial detention and immigration detention. 

Over the last nine years, our work has reliably supported thousands of individuals and their families. And at the same time, we recognize that by channeling our resources directly into the criminal legal and immigration detention systems, we risk inadvertently sustaining and legitimizing systems and actors we know to be fundamentally unjust. 

Fiscally, we recognize and hold dear our responsibility to steward our resources in a way that ensures Minnesota Freedom Fund can continue to dig in and push for transformative systemic change. 

In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd and nationwide uprisings against police violence, our organization received $42 million in donations from all over the world. In the years since, we’ve put those resources to work, investing $33.2 million directly into freeing people from cages and resourcing organizations in the fight for racial justice. 

We’re proud of the unprecedented impact of our organization, and we want to ensure that we’re strongly positioned to support our community until, with your continued support, we end pretrial and immigration detention.  

Where are we going next?

Beginning June 1, 2025, Minnesota Freedom Fund will reorient our efforts toward advocacy, community education, and fighting for transformative change in the pretrial and immigration systems. We will invest in strategies that challenge the foundations of pretrial detention and immigration enforcement, not just address symptoms. 

Our goal is not to sustain our organization indefinitely. We must put ourselves out of business once and for all by ending the systems we were created to confront. 

We recognize this change will affect partners like you, our clients, and the broader communities we serve together. But we also know that this necessary shift toward lasting, systemic transformation will allow us to deepen our shared struggle toward actualizing a world without cages. 

Please submit questions or concerns to info@mnfreedomfund.org. 

Thank you for standing with us. It’s time to dig in and continue the good fight! 

We are grateful for your partnership, and we look forward to working alongside you to combat harms of pretrial jailing and immigration detention — more focused, more committed, and more aligned with our vision for justice. 

We will keep you informed on new developments, and we’re eager to share the increased impact and power of Minnesota Freedom Fund.