A few weeks ago, Washington DC played host to the annual Citi Open, a nice-sized tennis tournament for men and women. Several of the Black tennis players commented on how much they love playing in DC specifically because of the diversity. Hailey Baptiste said “DC is probably one of the Blackest stops on tour.” Frances Tiafoe, a Beltway native on the Maryland side, remarked that he always loves to play “at home” and he, as a Black man, loves playing in DC because there are “so many people of color in the stands, it’s awesome. Chocolate City for a reason. Diversity is insane. I love being here.” It’s all true – DC has a majority Black population for decades. And now that population is being policed by the National Guard and FBI. Donald Trump has placed the DC police force under federal control, and deployed the National Guard for no reason other than he saw a homeless person on his way to the golf course.
President Donald Trump announced Monday that he was placing the D.C. police under direct federal control and will deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington to fight crime, an extraordinary flex of federal power that stripped city leadership of its ability to make law enforcement decisions and could expose residents of the nation’s capital to unpredictable encounters with a domestically deployed military force.
The decision to take over the D.C. police and deploy 800 National Guard troops comes as the president has been slamming America’s cities as places where crime is out of control, despite two years of declines that have brought homicide levels in many major cities to their lowest levels in decades.
The administration has already mobilized FBI agents in recent days in overnight shifts to help local law enforcement prevent carjackings and violent crime, officials said. Because the District of Columbia is not a state, the federal government has unusually sweeping powers to intervene over the objections of its residents and leaders, giving the president an opportunity to use it as a laboratory for a militarized approach to urban crime-fighting.
Under the city’s Home Rule Act, the president can take over the D.C. police for a period of up to 30 days by declaring “special conditions of an emergency nature exist.” After that time, the police would revert to local control unless Congress passes a law to allow a longer period of federal control.
Whether the administration would want to extend the takeover beyond 30 days is unclear. In previous actions, including sending the National Guard to Los Angeles, Trump made high-profile declarations, then allowed the federal deployments to fade out over time. A longer period of federal accountability for local D.C. crime could raise the political risk for Trump.
The last time this kind of National Guard contingent was deployed into DC, it was in the hours after Trump’s violent cult members tried to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021. The National Guard was deployed to keep members of Congress safe from psychotic insurrectionists, many of whom have been pardoned by Donald Trump in recent months. This is a shocking federal takeover of an American city, and Trump is threatening/promising to do the same thing in other American cities (cities with large Black populations).
DC’s Mayor Muriel Bowser called Trump’s move “unsettling and unprecedented” but she also indicated that she’s not surprised that Trump is doing this in her city. Mayor Bowser also said: “We’re going to work every day to get this emergency put to an end — I’ll call it the ‘so-called emergency.’”
Trump announces he’s placing the DC police department “under direct federal control” and deploying the National Guard in the city
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 11, 2025 at 10:42 AM
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
