The Trump Administration Shut Down a Police Misconduct Database. Now It's Facing a FOIA Lawsuit

Last year the Trump administration shut down a national database of misconduct by federal law enforcement officers. Now it’s facing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for refusing to release records about that decision.

A coalition of civil rights and police accountability groups filed a FOIA lawsuit on September 4 after waiting 10 months for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release records about why it pulled the plug on the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), a nonpublic database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement officers.

The Justice Department launched NLEAD in 2023 to assist federal agencies with hiring and oversight. However, in one of his first acts after returning to the White House in 2025, President Donald Trump ordered the department to delete it. In a written statement to The Washington Post, the White House said former President Joe Biden’s executive order creating the database “was full of woke, anti-police concepts.”

Before the DOJ scrapped NLEAD, it had logged more than 5,200 incidents of misconduct by federal officers—more than 70 percent of them Bureau of Prisons (BOP) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees.

Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center and National Immigration Project, says the lawsuit is not seeking the misconduct data itself, but rather records “about how and why the government dismantled its own accountability tool.”

“You can’t build a national misconduct database, watch federal agencies run 10,000 searches against it in eight months, shut it down, and then tell the public that there’s nothing urgent about explaining why,” Enriquez says.

The Kennedy Human Rights Center, along with the National Police Accountability Project, Black Lives Matter D.C., and National Immigration Project, filed a FOIA request last October seeking records concerning the creation, operation, and decommissioning of NLEAD, as well as whether the data was preserved or destroyed.

The Justice Department first agreed to fast-track the FOIA request based on the heightened public interest in the records, but then reversed its decision. The coalition’s FOIA lawsuit says the department has been sitting on their request for 10 months now.

Civil liberties groups have called for the creation of centralized databases of police misconduct because, traditionally, poor information sharing between departments and lax background checks have allowed problem officers to hop from one department to another, leaving a string of misconduct, rights violations, and expensive lawsuits.

“This was about giving people more information to make smart hiring decisions,” Enriquez says. “Just as you always check someone’s recommendations whenever you’re hiring for your department, we want to do that with people who are entrusted with public safety before we put a weapon in the hands of someone and give them the authority to arrest or even use deadly force. We want to make sure that they don’t have a record of abusing that authority.”

Federal law enforcement unions opposed NLEAD, arguing that it included minor administrative infractions and didn’t give officers due process channels to dispute their inclusion.

The decommissioning of the NLEAD database preceded a massive hiring spree by the Department of Homeland Security as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign last spring. To reach its recruitment goals, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fast-tracked training and lowered standards. Public concerns over who ICE is putting on the street with a mask, badge, and gun rose considerably after several fatal shootings by immigration officers.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that ICE is now quietly firing new recruits with red flags in their backgrounds that should have been caught with adequate vetting.

“Not only are we seeing a massive expansion of hiring,” Enriquez says, “but we’re also seeing very high-profile abuses of authority—shootings, killings, of U.S. citizens on the streets by DHS officers—so the urgency for this type of information is greater than ever.”

The post The Trump Administration Shut Down a Police Misconduct Database. Now It’s Facing a FOIA Lawsuit appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Source: https://reason.com/2026/09/15/the-trump-administration-shut-down-a-police-misconduct-database-now-its-facing-a-foia-lawsuit/