‘Their heroism will never be forgotten’: Congress created a plaque for Jan. 6 police, but visitors to the Capitol won’t find it anywhere

Nearly five years after the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, an official plaque honoring the police who protected the building that day cannot be found. The plaque is not on display at the Capitol, even though the law requires it to be there. No one publicly knows where it is, though it’s likely sitting in storage somewhere.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, has not officially unveiled the plaque yet. According to HuffPost, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice is now trying to dismiss a lawsuit from police officers who want the plaque displayed as planned. The Architect of the Capitol, who was supposed to get and display the plaque, said they can’t comment because of the ongoing court case.

Around 100 members of Congress, mostly Democrats, have decided to take action themselves. For months, they’ve been putting up poster board copies of the January 6 plaque outside their office doors. This has turned the Capitol complex into a building full of homemade memorials.

The missing plaque leaves room for people to forget what happened

The fake plaques read: “On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on Jan. 6, 2021. Their heroism will never be forgotten.” Washington D.C. is a city filled with monuments to the nation’s history. 

The plaque was supposed to be a simple but permanent marker placed near the Capitol’s west front, where some of the worst violence happened when rioters broke into the building.Without the plaque, something else is happening instead – a culture of forgetting. 

Visitors can walk through the Capitol without any official reminder of what took place that day, when a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the building to try to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Without any memory markers, new stories can spread, and revised versions of history can take over.

Five years ago, what happened was called an “insurrection” by the then-Republican leader of the Senate. The House Republican leader at the time called it his “saddest day” in Congress. But those strong statements have faded away. 

Trump now calls it a “day of love.” And Johnson, who was among the lawmakers challenging the 2020 election results, is now the House speaker. Trump has been making decisions that affect Republican lawmakers and their future plans in significant ways.

At least five people died during the riot and afterward, including Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by police while trying to climb through a window toward the House chamber. More than 140 law enforcement officers were injured, some very seriously, and several died later, some by suicide. 

About 1,500 people were charged in the Capitol attack, making it one of the largest federal prosecutions in the nation’s history. When Trump returned to power in January 2025, he pardoned all of them within hours of taking office.

Lawmakers approved the plaque in March 2022 as part of a larger government funding package. The resolution said the U.S. “owes its deepest gratitude to those officers” and gave instructions for a plaque listing the names of officers “who responded to the violence that occurred.” 

It set a one-year deadline for installation at the Capitol. This summer, two officers who fought the mob that day sued over the delay. The Justice Department is seeking to have the case dismissed. Meanwhile, Trump vetoed funding for water projects affecting certain Republican districts.