Trump Administration Dismantles Protections Against Law Enforcement Abuses
President Donald Trump has flouted judicial orders and publicly mused aloud about sending American citizens to the notorious mega-prison in El Salvador. So it’s hardly a surprise that his administration has effectively removed all of the guardrails protecting U.S. residents from the abuses of law enforcement.
President Joe Biden’s administration funded the police, as the ex-president promised, while also investigating police misconduct, and working to curtail many of the worst law enforcement abuses, like the use of chokeholds, or, as some may remember, the “whips” Border Patrol agents used to chase Haitian immigrants away from the U.S.-Mexico border. Under Biden (and President Barack Obama), law enforcement was treated as a public good: well-trained, organized, and rule-abiding. Although Biden rejected calls in 2020 to “defund the police,” he signed an executive order that took steps towards police accountability.
Enter Trump. His administration has been clear that not only are they willing to break the law and the U.S. Constitution to deport people, they are determined to protect law enforcement as they participate in more and more questionable acts., The Trump administration has been quietly dismantling federal departments tasked with uncovering and reducing police violence as well as ensuring that local law enforcement agencies are permitted to run lawless, a sign, perhaps, of their increasing importance in Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
It’s not a surprise that Trump himself sympathizes with so-called law enforcement agents who break the law. One of his first presidential pardons was the notorious ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio who had been found guilty of racially profiling immigrants with the express goal of sending them into deportation proceedings. Arpaio is now experiencing a renaissance of sorts, recently embraced (literally) by “Border Czar” Tom Homan as the example of good law enforcement.
The day after Trump pardoned over 1,500 people convicted of crimes related to Jan. 6, he pardoned two police officers convicted for their role in the death of a young man in a deadly car chase. One officer was charged with second-degree murder and conspiracy to obstruct and obstruction of justice; both officers were convicted of covering up the death through impeding the investigation and drafting a false police report.
Trump also took down a federal database intended to track federal law enforcement officers who had committed misconduct, called the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD). This database came out of the 2020 movement against police violence as a way to prevent officers from moving to different departments to avoid accountability. The database included around 150,000 federal officers and agents and was only able to produce one report. (Trump seems to have forgotten that he actually directed federal agencies to create a database like NLEAD in 2020.)
While much of this is already in action before our eyes, leaving some 18,000 law enforcement agencies without federal oversight or limits places everyone in peril.
The database was part of Biden’s executive order on police reforms, which he signed in May, 2022. During his first few days in office, Trump eliminated them all via executive order, describing them as “unlawful and radical DEI ideology.”
The most important federal agency in limiting police power is the Department of Justice which, historically, investigated local police agencies and brought lawsuits with the goal of punishing bad actors and ensuring that such abuses of power did not reoccur, often called “pattern and practice” investigations.
Since Trump took office, the DOJ froze all work on pending police misconduct investigations, including high-profile work in places like Minneapolis, where an officer murdered George Floyd, and Lexington, Kentucky, where a SWAT team killed Breonna Taylor. ProPublica found that at least eight investigations, many started in the waning days of Biden’s presidency, were also on the chopping block. These pending investigations included a report regarding use-of-force by the Louisiana state police in which state troopers attacked a Black man named Ronald Greene.
According to the DOJ, troopers “tased Mr. Greene repeatedly and pulled him out of his car. They punched him, dragged him by ankle shackles, and left him face down in the road.” Investigators found that the troopers also failed to provide immediate medical aid; Greene died. Louisiana officials downplayed the DOJ report and seem unlikely to conduct a thorough investigation in the absence of federal investigators.
Other pending investigations in places like Lexington, Mississippi, Memphis, Tennessee, and Mount Vernon, New York, also appear unlikely to move forward under the Trump administration. Again, as in Louisiana, local officials appear unlikely to move forward with reforms or accountability measures. In Lexington, the DOJ noted the problem of retaliation against residents who tried to hold police accountable, including the arrest of a civil-rights lawyer. In addition to these investigations, in which DOJ officials found evidence of police misconduct, there is little reason to think Trump’s DOJ will do anything to monitor stop-and-frisk or other abusive practices so common on the local level.
Trump has also dismantled the agency tasked with oversight of the Department of Homeland Security. Considering the recent high-profile errors, abuses, and violence of ICE and Border Patrol agents, it seems highly convenient that Trump eliminated checks on their power.
Bear in mind, this is just what we know is happening. The FBI and other federal agencies operate largely in secret, for national security reasons, and without sufficient guardrails or any sense of Constitutional limits, it is possible that more is happening without anyone noticing.
This could include the weaponization of federal law enforcement against people targeted by the Trump administration. Trump has already fired lawyers who investigated his own alleged crimes and fired federal law enforcement officials who did not want to reorient their agencies towards mass deportations. While much of this is already in action before our eyes, leaving some 18,000 law enforcement agencies without federal oversight or limits places everyone in peril.
Jessica Pishko is an independent journalist and lawyer who focuses on how the criminal justice system and law enforcement intersects with political power. As a Democracy Docket contributor, Jessica writes about the criminalization of elections and how sheriffs in particular have become a growing threat to democracy.