Trump’s Anti-Police Reform Executive Orders And How They Impact Black/ Latino Citizens

Source: The Washington Post / Getty

At this point, even writing about how President Donald Trump’s second administration has been an oppressive, authoritative, diet-fascist, white nationalist wet dream feels redundant. From his propaganda-reliant warpath on DEI and Black and Latino immigrants (whether they’re here legally or not) to his legally questionable DOGE office gutting the federal government of, well, pretty much anything Trump and his MAGA klan of bumbling idiots have decided they don’t like for various, mostly non-factual reasons, this administration is making America regress again with every new executive order Trump signs.

Anyway — since covering Trump shenanigans is a necessary job regardless of how exhaustingly tedious it is — let’s take a look at the pro-police EOs that have been signed by the 34-time felon who has been found liable for sexual assault and who pardoned Jan. 6 rioters who brutally attacked several police officers. (Yeah — keeping up with Trump’s glaring hypocrisy is also a full-time job, but we gotta do it.)

First, for all the people out there who claim Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same, it’s worth noting that only one of those parties fights tooth and nail to undermine any and all attempts at police reform no matter how reasonable they are and how demonstrably necessary. And that’s why it should have surprised absolutely no one when Trump didn’t let a full day of his second term go by without immediately doing away with Biden-era police reform measures as well as some that were implemented during his first term.

From the Brennan Center For Justice:

After the Senate failed in 2021 to pass a bipartisan package of law enforcement reforms — the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — the Biden administration sought to implement as much of the legislation as possible through executive order. Signed May 2022 on the second anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, the action aimed “to promote safe and accountable policing” in myriad ways.

Consider the order’s highlights. It permitted federal police to use force only as a tool of last resort. It curtailed when federal police could enter a home without knocking and announcing themselves and when they could use chokeholds. It mandated body cameras. It limited the transfer and sale of federal military equipment to state and local law enforcement. It required the Department of Justice to launch a national misconduct database for federal police. And, recognizing that most policing is local, it encouraged reform of state and local policing through various grants.

During his first term, Trump championed many of these measures. Take, for example, the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database. It is a national repository of substantiated misconduct claims and disciplinary records of federal police officers. It was created largely to address the problem of the “wandering officer” who shuffles from department to department after resignation or discharge due to misconduct. Biden, as part of his policing order, directed the DOJ to create the database, and the department did so. In December 2024, the DOJ reported that the database, since its debut one year earlier, has been searched nearly 10,000 times to inform federal policing employment determinations.

But before there was National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, there was Trump’s 2020 directive to, essentially, create it. Trump’s version would’ve been similar but not the same. It would’ve included policing misconduct but also “concerning instances of excessive force.” And unlike the current database, Trump’s problematic-officer registry would’ve aggregated and anonymized information about officers and made it publicly available — a feature some advocates still want to see.

And yet, just hours after Trump was sworn into office on Jan. 20, he signed an order to take down the database, which tracks for a president who, during his campaign, promised police officers blanket “immunity from prosecution” and mused that the nation should allow for “one real rough, nasty day” where police officers could freely commit acts of police brutality. In fact, Trump justified the absurdity of giving cops immunity and a get-out-of-an-excessive-force-charge-free card by lying about cops not being allowed to do their jobs even when they catch a criminal in the act of committing a crime.

“What the hell is going on?” Trump asked at the time. “See, we have to let the police do their job. And if they have to be extraordinarily rough. And you know, the funny thing with all of that stuff, look at the department stores — same thing — they walk into it. You see these guys walking out with air conditioners —with refrigerators on their backs. The craziest thing. And the police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told if you do anything, you’re gonna lose your pension, you’re gonna lose your family, your house, your car.”

Of course, Trump never bothered to cite a single instance where an on-duty police officer lost their pension, house, car and family for doing the only thing they’re legally obligated to do when they visibly catch someone committing theft. I mean, why bother with a pesky thing like evidence when you know your following of ignorant bigots who probably can’t read past a sixth-grade level will take everything you say at face value?

Trump also signed the Restoring The Death Penalty And Protecting Public Safety executive order, which, among other things, requires the death penalty for people convicted of killing police officers, which is sure to appease the “Blue lives matter” advocates who pretend police officers aren’t already treated like a protected class with laws that permit far steeper penalties for crimes committed against cops than when the same crimes are committed against civilians.

Trump’s police brutality and overreach-friendly executive orders aren’t just sure to disproportionately impact Black and Latino Americans — which anti-police reform policies always do —  they’re also aimed at making the lives of undocumented (and documented) migrants more difficult, fearful and miserable. According to NBC News, just a couple of weeks after Trump signed his first series of MAGA-pleasing EOs, he signed an order that would rescind sanctuary policies for migrants. In other words, Trump’s administration vowed that migrants would no longer be safe from ICE while inside places like churches, schools, and domestic violence and disaster relief shelters.

The order also expanded the departments that could police and investigate potentially undocumented migrants so that it isn’t just ICE that is tasked with such efforts. Now, the FBI, DEA, ATF, the U.S. Marshals and the Bureau of Prisons have been ordered by the Department of Justice to “review their files for identifying information and/or biometric data relating to non-citizens located illegally in the United States.”

Trump and his cohorts would have us believe these EOs have been all about cementing the GOP as the “party of law and order,” but if that were the case, Trump would be going just as hard against white-collar crime, rich, white rapists and sexual abusers, or, at the very least, a bunch of domestic terrorists who beat and tased police officers at the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overthrow the government, inspired by Trump’s own election fraud propaganda. Instead, Trump’s orders are all about cracking down on poor people, Black people, migrants and the the rest of the most vulnerable, marginalized people in the nation.

The cruelty is the point, and every executive order Trump signs reinforces that point.

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