The White House contended that the database used to monitor misconduct among federal law enforcement personnel was saturated with woke, anti-police notions.
Last year, the Trump administration shuttered a nationwide repository that tracked misconduct by federal officers. It is now facing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for refusing to disclose records explaining that decision.
A coalition of civil rights and police accountability groups filed a FOIA suit on September 4 after waiting ten months for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release records about why it terminated the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), a private database that logged misconduct by federal law enforcement personnel.
NLEAD was created by the DOJ in 2023 to aid federal agencies in hiring and oversight. Yet, in one of his first actions 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 asserted that Biden’s executive order establishing the database “was filled with woke, anti-police concepts.”
Before its elimination, NLEAD had recorded more than 5,200 misconduct incidents by federal officers—over 70 percent of which involved Bureau of Prisons (BOP) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel.
Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, says the lawsuit targets not the misconduct data itself but 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 remarks.
The Kennedy Human Rights Center, along with the National Police Accountability Project, Black Lives Matter D.C., and the National Immigration Project, filed a FOIA request last October seeking documentation on the creation, operation, and decommissioning of NLEAD, as well as whether the data was retained or destroyed.
The Justice Department initially agreed to fast-track the FOIA request due to heightened public interest, but later reversed course. The coalition’s FOIA lawsuit contends that the department has held onto their request for ten months.
Civil liberties groups have long advocated for centralized databases of police misconduct because, historically, fragmented information sharing among agencies and lax background checks allowed problematic officers to move from one department to another, leaving a trail of misconduct, rights violations, and costly lawsuits.
“This was about equipping people with more information to make smarter hiring decisions,” Enriquez explains. “Just as you vet candidates’ references when hiring for your department, we want to vet those who will be entrusted with public safety before arming them and granting authority to arrest or even use deadly force. We want to ensure they don’t have a history of abusing that power.”
Unions representing federal law enforcement officers opposed NLEAD, arguing that it included minor administrative infractions and did not provide officers with due-process avenues to challenge their inclusion.
The shutdown of NLEAD preceded a sweeping DHS hiring push tied to the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts last spring. To meet recruitment targets, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accelerated training and lowered standards. Public concern about who ICE is deploying—armed officers with masks and badges—grew after several fatal shootings by immigration officers.
The Washington Post reported this week that ICE is quietly terminating new recruits whose backgrounds contain red flags that adequate vetting should have flagged.
“Not only are we witnessing a substantial expansion in hiring,” Enriquez notes, “but we’re also seeing high-profile abuses of authority—shootings and the deaths of U.S. citizens on streets by DHS personnel—so the need for this kind of information is greater than ever.”
