What Trump’s D.C. Takeover Looks Like on the Ground, Two Weeks On

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12:00 p.m. EDT

08.23.2025

Promising to take over police to combat crime, Trump’s effort has as an alternative morphed into largely an immigration dragnet.

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On Thursday evening, President Donald Trump visited a U.S. Park Police facility in southeast Washington, D.C., turning what was initially billed because the president going “on patrol” right into a a lot much less dramatic affair. He handed out pizza and hamburgers to roughly 300 legislation enforcement personnel, thanking them for his or her work within the metropolis.

It was the most recent flip in an almost two-week odyssey since Trump declared a “public security emergency” within the nation’s capital and invoked rarely-used statutory powers to attempt to override native management of policing and prison justice within the metropolis. The ensuing fallout has included a whole lot of arrests, and widespread opposition from residents, metropolis leaders and authorized specialists.

Probably the most unprecedented a part of Trump’s Aug. 11 announcement had a really temporary shelf life. Inside a few day of naming Terry Cole, the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, as “emergency police commissioner,” a federal decide took a skeptical view on whether or not such a transfer can be authorized.

The Division of Justice subsequently rescinded the hassle to take over the Metropolitan Police Division, however secured a concession from metropolis management: full cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Beneath the association, Cole can request police help, however doesn’t have command authority over officers.

As a substitute, the takeover has been extra of a parallel federal presence, with the administration flooding the district with nationwide guard personnel, FBI, DEA, ICE and different federal brokers. About 2,000 guardspeople have been deployed, with these numbers buoyed by Nationwide Guard troops despatched from Republican-led states in latest days. Guard members have largely been stationed at federal landmarks and high-traffic areas. Initially, guard personnel have been unarmed, however on Friday, Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth approved arming Nationwide Guard forces patrolling town.

Roughly 500 federal brokers, in the meantime, have been patrolling neighborhoods on foot, conducting checkpoints, visitors stops, and immigration enforcement sweeps.

After early studies from some individuals within the metropolis’s high-crime neighborhoods that not one of the authorities’s acknowledged crime-fighting enthusiasm had made it there, the White Home launched knowledge suggesting that half of all non-immigration arrests in the course of the surge had been in high-crime neighborhoods. General there’s a lack of detailed knowledge on who’s arresting whom and for what alleged crimes, however a lot of the police interactions thus far have been citations and arrests for minor crimes, in accordance with the native ABC affiliate.

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Legal professional for the District, has instructed prosecutors in her workplace to hunt most fees in all D.C. arrests, aside from one sudden caveat: This week she introduced her workplace wouldn’t prosecute gun possession circumstances involving shotguns or rifles, together with AR-style rifles, citing constitutional issues.

Based on a number of studies, the takeover has chilled public exercise within the metropolis. Knowledge from Open Desk confirmed restaurant reservations within the district have been down by as a lot as 31% a day in comparison with final 12 months in the course of the first week of the takeover, then rebounded on Monday, Aug. 18. The dip in exercise was much more pronounced in immigrant neighborhoods, with one fruit vendor telling The Related Press that enterprise is now worse than in the course of the early days of the pandemic.

The president made numerous false and deceptive claims about crime within the district when explaining the rationale for his takeover effort. These claims have been picked aside intimately by quite a few observers and publications.

D.C. does expertise increased charges of murder, carjacking and armed theft than many different massive American cities, however violent crime has declined considerably over the previous 12 months by most metrics. Trump has attacked town and FBI crime statistics as false, citing one MPD commander who has been accused of manipulating statistics. However the division has countered that even when true, such an effort wouldn’t implicate city-wide knowledge — a conclusion shared by no less than one crime knowledge knowledgeable.

Many residents of the district do have issues about crime, and have expressed basic assist for efforts to carry crime charges down, however Trump’s unilateral takeover has been terribly unpopular. Based on polling launched this week, practically 80% of residents both considerably or strongly oppose the efforts. The Washington Submit-Schar College ballot additionally discovered that residents really feel much less secure beneath the takeover than earlier than it.

Immigration enforcement has made up a big a part of the policing surge. As of Tuesday, practically half of the arrests “for the reason that begin of operations” in D.C. have been of undocumented individuals, an administration spokesperson instructed The Wall Avenue Journal. That has been largely pushed by ICE concentrating on places like bilingual daycare facilities, Spanish-speaking church buildings and visitors stops to test the citizenship standing of supply drivers on mopeds.

Some have nervous from the beginning that Trump’s efforts in D.C. is likely to be a costume rehearsal for efforts in different Democratic-led cities — certainly, Trump vaguely threatened as a lot. Others have poured chilly water on that suspicion, mentioning that the president has distinctive authorized authority over the district that doesn’t translate elsewhere.

More and more, it appears as if each camps could also be confirmed proper. The president’s management over D.C. is undeniably a particular case, and the hassle to take over the police division there in earnest lasted barely a day. However Democratic leaders throughout the nation fear that components of the immigration enforcement surge, and the administration’s profitable efforts at bypassing the district’s “sanctuary metropolis” protections, could also be predictive of what the feds will attempt elsewhere, Politico reported this week.

For a lot of commentators, that’s all the time been the purpose. They argue that the surge was by no means about crime, however about Trump projecting dominance — significantly over cities which have lengthy resisted his agenda.

“The deployment of out-of-state Nationwide Guard troops and extra federal brokers onto D.C. streets is a brazen abuse of energy meant to intimidate and create concern within the nation’s capital,” mentioned Monica Hopkins, govt director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia. “That is an pointless overstep to micromanage D.C. beneath a phony emergency, inflicting actual hurt to residents and guests — all to advance the Trump administration’s political agenda.”