The Trump Administration Stopped Centrally Tracking Federal Law Enforcement Misconduct

Federal agents’ killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good refocused a nationwide reckoning around Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics, forcing the administration to answer to an angry public.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, told reporters that the federal agents involved in Pretti’s death may not have been following “protocol.”

Institutionally, however, Trump has made it harder for the public — and state and local governments — to find incidents of federal agents’ misconduct, or track fatal uses of force.

The Department of Justice suspended its National Law Enforcement Accountability Database last year after Trump issued an order rolling back Biden-era measures on police reform, diversity initiatives and more.

While agencies may be keeping internal data on federal law enforcement officers, including about fatal uses of force, there hasn’t been “any significant effort” to replace the comprehensive, public overview that NLEAD provided on misconduct, Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson for the Prison Policy Initiative, told NOTUS.

“The database was intended to … increase public trust, and then also presumably to facilitate, more interagency communication on stuff like this, maybe to prevent wandering officer syndrome, where people would do something bad, and then they get rehired by a different organization,” said Bertram, whose organization works with data on prisons and policing.

The Justice Department did not respond to questions from NOTUS about whether it has any other tools to track and distribute the misconduct data that NLEAD contained and, if so, whether it plans to make any of that data public. In a statement, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection “are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and themselves.”

“Despite these grave threats and dangerous situations our law enforcement is put in, they show incredible restraint in exhausting all options before any kind of non-lethal force is used,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson did not respond to any of NOTUS’ questions around misconduct data collection.

NLEAD data on specific officers who engaged in misconduct was only available to authorized users, like other law enforcement agencies, but the Justice Department released a periodic, public anonymized report summarizing misconduct among federal officers.

State and local law enforcement agencies used the information in NLEAD to assess their legal risk when hiring former federal law enforcement officers who had been involved in misconduct.

Before the Justice Department shut down the database, CBP agents made up the second-largest share of instances of misconduct recorded between 2017 and 2024, according to data obtained by the nonprofit newsroom The Appeal. Federal Bureau of Prisons officers — who are also on the ground in Minneapolis as part of Trump’s crackdown — were first, making up more than half of the instances of misconduct in the database, according to The Appeal.

At least eight people have also died while in federal immigration custody this year, and 2025 was the deadliest year for people in ICE custody.

Advocates have questioned the end of federal data collection amid the uptick in deaths under federal law enforcement supervision.

“The federal government’s expanding enforcement presence in cities across the United States raises serious questions about whether any current oversight structures are adequate to safeguard civil rights and community well-being,” the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement said in a statement after the Minnesota shootings.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, suggested last year that the suspension of NLEAD violated federal public records laws.

Almost 200 Democratic lawmakers in a previous session of Congress attempted to establish a national law enforcement misconduct tracking system that is codified in law — but those efforts haven’t gone anywhere.

Some advocates are lobbying for lawmakers to pick up that campaign again.

“There are certain officers that certain members of the community should be able to be aware pose a risk,” said Lauren Bonds, the executive director of the National Policing Accountability Project. “It’s becoming more and more important as we are seeing more and more incidents of police violence, of ICE violence, of CBP violence.”

Data that is collected around federal agents’ misconduct is not publicly available.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation tracks instances where federal law enforcement officers use force, which includes data from 87 different federal law enforcement entities. But agencies provide data to the FBI on a voluntary basis, and the data is not public. The FBI database also does not include instances of force by ICE agents, according to a list of participating federal agencies on the FBI’s website.

State-level tracking also exists, including through the National Decertification Index, which offers requestable data on state law enforcement officers whose licenses or certifications are revoked after misconduct.

A Duke Law School study published in 2020 found that some officers who engage in misconduct are often rehired by other law enforcement agencies, especially by smaller departments without as many oversight resources.

The end of NLEAD has also created confusion around how the federal government is responding to misconduct by its agents, particularly in an environment where questions are already swirling about what prompted the Minneapolis shootings and where the officers who perpetrated them are now.

The ICE officer who shot Good has not returned to work, but it is unclear what his employment status with the agency is.

Reports Tuesday said the CBP officers who shot Pretti were placed on administrative leave, just days after CBP commander Greg Bovino said the involved agents would “likely” be moved to administrative roles.

A CBP spokesperson confirmed to NOTUS in a statement that the two officers involved in Pretti’s shooting have been on administrative leave since Saturday as part of “standard protocol,” but did not answer NOTUS’ questions about whether those officers’ involvement has been documented anywhere.