Data obtained by The Appeal shows that more than 75 percent of the misconduct incidents in NLEAD, the federal police misconduct database Trump deleted this month, were generated by prison and border guards.
Within days of President Donald Trump’s second oath of office last month, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) shut down its National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), a national directory former President Joe Biden created in 2022 to track police misconduct. Trump’s decision means thousands of federal law enforcement officers with misconduct histories are far less likely to have their misdeeds exposed during federal hiring, promotion, and retention decisions.
According to data The Appeal obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the primary beneficiaries of NLEAD’s demise are Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees.
The Appeal obtained the dataset—a list of each NLEAD entry’s agency, year, and type, without names or identifying information—before Trump removed the dataset entirely this month. According to that data, BOP and CBP employees comprised more than 70 percent of the more than 5,200 misconduct instances recorded in NLEAD between 2017 and 2024. BOP officers accounted for more than 2,600 incidents—over half of all entries. CBP was the next largest contributor, supplying 1,169 records, or about 22 percent of the database.
The Biden Administration created NLEAD in a 2022 executive order, which Trump rescinded as part of a bulk action on his first day in office. Last week, the White House confirmed to the Washington Post that the DOJ had deleted NLEAD’s archive.
In a written statement, the White House told the Post that the “Biden executive order creating this database was full of woke, anti-police concepts that make communities less safe like a call for ‘equitable’ policing and addressing ‘systemic racism in our criminal justice system.’ President Trump rescinded the order creating this database on Day 1 because he is committed to giving our brave men and women of law enforcement the tools they need to stop crime.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice did not respond to The Appeal before publication.
In its 2022 executive order, the Biden administration said it created NLEAD to “increase public trust” in law enforcement. The database, which came online in Dec. 2023, gave federal law enforcement agencies “a centralized repository of official records documenting instances of officer misconduct” dating back to 2017. According to the DOJ, NLEAD tracked identifying information, agency, incident date, and incident type for more than 4,000 federal law enforcement officers. The Biden administration intended the database’s contents to be government-facing: state, local, and tribal governments, as well as members of the public, could not access it. According to a December report by the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, federal agencies queried NLEAD nearly 10,000 times between Jan. and Aug. 2024.
Events that could lead to an officer’s inclusion in NLEAD included civil judgments, criminal convictions, disciplinary actions, resignations or retirements while under investigation for serious misconduct, suspension of law enforcement authorities, or sustained complaints or records of disciplinary actions based on findings of serious misconduct. According to Biden’s 2022 executive order, “serious misconduct” included “excessive force, bias, discrimination, obstruction of justice, false reports, false statements under oath, theft, and sexual misconduct” by federal law enforcement officers.
Fourteen of the 94 federal agencies (15 percent) reported one or more incidents of misconduct, according to the first annual (and last ever) statistical report released in December by the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The report shows that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and DOJ contributed 88 percent of the incidents in the database.
BOP officers made up most of the reports even though the agency accounts for only about 15-30 percent of the 150,000-person federal law enforcement workforce.
“I think the BOP has the majority of the complaints just because they have the most interaction with the population,” said Paul Wright, Editor of Prison Legal News and Executive Director of the Human Rights Defense Center, which documents and reports abuses in carceral settings.
The overwhelming majority of BOP records, denoted in NLEAD as “flags,” stem from more than 2,000 cases of “sustained complaints or records of disciplinary action based on findings of serious misconduct.” The rest of the BOP’s data include nearly 200 criminal convictions, another 200 misconduct-related terminations, and several dozen resignations while under investigation.
In an interview with The Appeal, former Border Patrol Agent Jenn Budd, who keeps an open-source repository of documented CBP misconduct, questioned whether the data the agency submitted to NLEAD actually included all of the instances of criminal convictions and sustained misconduct. Using CBP data, federal dockets, and news reports, Budd documented more than 480 arrests of Border Patrol agents alone (which does not include the CBP officials who work in airports and land crossings) since 2021.
While Budd said the dataset was better than nothing, she cautioned that federal law enforcement didn’t use the information to clean up its ranks while NLEAD existed.
“NLEAD was valuable only in the sense that it confirmed what we already knew from open sourcing—federal law enforcement officers are being arrested at alarming rates,” she said. “Few are charged, and a small percentage are convicted. Complaints against officers are investigated by their coworkers—or former coworkers—and go nowhere.”
Whatever the explanation for the apparent undercount of agent misconduct, problem officers in the federal government now have one less check on their abuses to worry about.
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