High-profile controversies involving progressive district attorneys increasingly dominate headlines across the country, from releasing violent repeat offenders and targeting police to clashing with federal immigration enforcement, prompting questions about what’s driving the surge.
Violent crime was a leading concern for voters in the 2024 presidential election, and the role of progressive policies has since drawn national attention. At a police memorial event in 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance condemned the agenda of “far-left prosecutors” backed by “faraway billionaires,” saying the administration has no tolerance for lawlessness. Leftist DAs have frequently used their offices to push increasingly radical policies. Even NBC News has acknowledged a broadly shared agenda among these “left-leaning Democratic district attorneys.”
Among the most controversial jurisdictions is Travis County, Texas, where Democrat DA José Garza is facing calls to resign after it was revealed that his office may have held secret meetings with Austin officials in an attempt to indict a police officer over an incident more than five years old.
The Austin Democrat is also taking heat from Congress after an internal office memo revealed guidelines that his critics say “incentivize” repeat criminal offenses in the county. Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, in a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, argues Travis County has become more “dangerous, unjust, and anarchic” since the progressive prosecutor took office in 2021, citing thousands of dismissed or rejected felony charges and rising crime.
Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, widely considered one of the nation’s most radical prosecutors, has threatened to cuff Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who were deployed to airports amid the partial government shutdown.
Democrat Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano, who has a history of freeing repeat offenders, faced major backlash in March for the release of criminal illegal alien Abdul Jalloh — a move that led to the murder of a Virginia mother.
The list goes on, and they all have one thing in common: a shared donor network directing prosecutorial policy across the country.
Garza reported $548,225 in political contributions throughout the 2020 election cycle in which he won office, including over $400,000 from the Texas arm of the national Justice & Public Safety PAC, which has backed multiple progressive prosecutors across the country. Descano received $601,153 from the same committee in 2019. Although Krasner did not directly receive money from the PAC, its Philadelphia branch spent over $1.7 million campaigning for him in 2017, according to campaign finance reports. In those years, billionaire leftist donor George Soros donated a combined total of $7,807,863 to the Justice & Public Safety PAC.
In addition to funding, the prosecutors received “communications” support from the Wren Collective, a leftist consulting firm offering “fee-free” services for “elected officials, grassroots advocates, and other allies,” according to a 2025 report by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. Garza’s office entered a non-disclosure agreement with the organization in 2022; Krasner’s office listed Wren Collective founder Jessica Brand as its official media contact and paid the firm as a campaign advisor; Descano’s team worked with the Wren Collective to “sketch out a policy and communications strategy” for his second term in office.
“Wren is proud to help reform prosecutors implement evidence-based policies to reduce crime and improve community safety. No matter how hard elected officials work, every large company or organization in every line of work needs outside support to fulfill its critical mission,” a spokesperson for the Wren Collective told the DCNF. “So, whether it’s Wren, Lexipol, the National District Attorneys Association, Accenture, Heritage, or any of the hundreds of consultant firms and non-profit organizations, prosecutor offices need support to do their vital work of keeping our streets safe.”
Founded in 2020 as an independent entity, the Wren Collective later became a project of the Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (SEE), a leftist donor conglomerate deeply entangled with organizations in the broader Soros network. In 2025, Wren moved to split off from SEE and become an independent 501(c)3 organization, obtaining tax-exempt status in December.
According to Influence Watch, SEE was originally founded in 1987 as the “American-Soviet Film Initiative” to “promote educational and cultural exchanges among citizens of the U.S. and citizens of the then-Soviet Union through films and television programs.”
The organization’s website states that it works to “empower, encourage and catalyze individuals to facilitate progressive change in areas of social justice and ecological restoration.” The website adds that the projects SEE fiscally sponsors “provide long-term cultural transformation to create a more socially just and environmentally sustainable world.”
Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) network gave SEE $7,632,740 between 2017 and 2023 through the Foundation to Promote Open Society (FPOS), one of the network’s grantmaking entities. According to the organization’s tax filings, SEE also gave $760,220 to the FPOS in 2024. The organization also fiscally sponsors groups promoting leftist viewpoints on prostitution, gun violence, and incarceration through OSF grants.
An OSF spokesman told the DCNF, “We are proud to support justice, human rights, and equity for communities across the country, and to advocate for a justice system that is fair and treats everyone equally.”
The spokesman also said the “grants we provided to organizations through SEE as a fiscal sponsor were earmarked for specific projects” and “cannot be redirected by the fiscal sponsor to support other projects.”
The Soros network is not SEE’s only source of funding. Tax filings show that the organization received $28,075,334 in taxpayer dollars between 2014 and 2024 through federal funding. The Biden administration supplied a majority of the grants, totaling $25,211,801 between 2021 and 2024.
The Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) obligated even more money to the organization. Government spending records show that the agency obligated a stunning $63,000,000 to SEE, intended to be redistributed in at least 197 “subaward agreements.”
The DCNF did not receive a response from SEE, Garza, Descano, or Krasner for a comment.
In 2019, NBC News reported on a “new wave of progressive DAs” taking the reins across the country. The story warned that prosecutors were “shaking up the criminal justice system,” pointing to Krasner and former Suffolk County DA Rachael Rollins as prime examples of the then- new trend.
Leftist prosecutors have since seen pushback in the form of lost elections and recalls in several jurisdictions. Former Alameda County DA Pamela Price was recalled in 2024 after allegedly facilitating rising crime in the county. Former Los Angeles County DA George Gascón, who seemed to stand by as property crime skyrocketed, also decisively lost his 2024 reelection bid.
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