DEA Ditches Body Cam Program In Response To Trump’s Rollback Of Biden Reform Efforts

The DEA may not be an early adopter of forward-looking policies, but it certainly leads the pack when it comes to shedding accountability like a teen ditching an ill-fitting sports coat the instant a family portrait session has wrapped up.

Federal law enforcement agencies definitely trailed the trends when it came to body cam use by officers. For years, the DOJ forbade local cops from using their body cameras during joint task force operations involving federal officers. It wasn’t until November 2020 that it agreed local officers could use their cameras in joint operations, but only if they agreed to play by the DOJ’s extremely stringent rules.

It took nearly another year before the DOJ agreed to start outfitting its own agencies with body cameras — something undoubtedly provoked by several months of intense civil unrest following the murder of unarmed Black man George Floyd by Minneapolis (MN) police officer Derek Chauvin.

Now that Trump has undone anything with Biden’s name on it, the DEA has informed its officers that body cams are no longer part of the federal drug enforcement process, as Mario Ariza reports for ProPublica:

The Drug Enforcement Administration has quietly ended its body camera program barely four years after it began, according to an internal email obtained by ProPublica.

On April 2, DEA headquarters emailed employees announcing that the program had been terminated effective the day before. The DEA has not publicly announced the policy change, but by early April, links to pages about body camera policies on the DEA’s website were broken.

The email said the agency made the change to be “consistent” with a Trump executive order rescinding the 2022 requirement that all federal law enforcement agents use body cameras.

Also gone is its official body camera policy [PDF], which has been replaced with a 404 message. (Archived here and embedded below.)

The DEA told its employees this vanishing was required to be “consistent” with Trump’s repeal of a Biden police accountability executive order. But ProPublica reports at least two other federal law enforcement agencies are still requiring officers to wear body cameras. One would assume the other agencies will follow the DEA’s lead and do the same, even if there’s nothing in Trump’s Biden order rollback or even the president’s more recent “GO POLICE STATE!” executive order that forbids the use of body cameras by federal officers.

While the DEA is taking the lead on the domestic-facing side when it comes to ditching the BWC-based pretense of accountability, it’s following the trail set by one of the most-reviled federal agencies in the nation:

In early February, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, was one of the first agencies to get rid of its body cameras. Subsequent videos show plainclothes immigration agents making arrests with no visible body cameras.

Of course it was. ICE doesn’t just make policies vanish. It makes human beings disappear. The last thing DHS and ICE need are a bunch of unblinking eyes creating a permanent record of extrajudicial arrests and renditionings.

Federal law enforcement is going dark again, returning to its normal state of nigh-impenetrable opacity. Trump and his team have reset the clock, rolling back the most minimal of gains in law enforcement accountability just because he and his administration love government thuggery more than they love this country or the millions of regular people they’re supposed to be serving.

It took years for the federal government to engage in an extremely timid roll out of tech that regular cops had been using for most of the past decade. It took only a few weeks to undo three years of progress. And when agencies were given the option to shed themselves of devices officers often consider to be impositions, they acted immediately, completely disregarding even the DOJ’s own assertions about the positive aspects of body-worn cameras. It’s 2025, but the DOJ has been given permission to pretend it’s 2015 all over again.