replication deleting users

I'm having an issue with LDAP replication hanging on our AWS ldap users (our master is on prem). So I've been playing with timeouts and keepalive But sometimes when I restart the slapd, it will start to continue replication and then all of a sudden it will start deleting all the users:

syncrepl_del_nonpresent: rid=222 be_delete DN (0)

and the only way I've found to recover is to stop the slapd, slapcat from the master and slapadd the ldif file into the consumer. Anyone know why this may be happening? Am I missing some setting that I haven't found yet?

thanks, ds