WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is promising new steps to tackle homelessness and crime in Washington, prompting the city’s mayor to voice concerns about the potential use of the National Guard to patrol the streets in the nation’s capital.
Trump wrote in a social media post that he planned a White House news conference at 10 a.m. Monday to discuss his plans to make the District of Columbia “safer and more beautiful than it ever was before.”
“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote Sunday. “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong.”
Last week the Republican president directed federal law enforcement agencies to increase their presence in Washington for seven days, with the option “to extend as needed.”
On Friday night, federal agencies including the Secret Service, the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service assigned more than 120 officers and agents to assist in Washington.
Trump said last week that he was considering ways for the federal government to seize control of Washington, asserting that crime was “ridiculous” and the city was “unsafe,” after the recent assault of a high-profile member of the Department of Government Efficiency.
The moves Trump said he was considering included bringing in the D.C. National Guard.
Mayor Muriel Bowser questioned the effectiveness of using the Guard to enforce city laws and said the federal government could be far more helpful by funding more prosecutors or filling the 15 vacancies on the D.C. Superior Court, some of which have been open for years.
Bowser cannot activate the National Guard herself, but she can submit a request to the Pentagon.
“I just think that’s not the most efficient use of our Guard,” she said Sunday on MSNBC’s “The Weekend,” acknowledging it is “the president’s call about how to deploy the Guard.”
Bowser was making her first public comments since Trump started posting about crime in Washington last week. She noted that violent crime in Washington has decreased since a rise in 2023. Trump’s weekend posts depicted the district as “one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the World.”
For Bowser, “Any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false.”
Police statistics show homicides, robberies and burglaries are all down this year when compared with this time in 2024. Overall violent crime is down 26% compared with this time a year ago.
Trump offered no details in Truth Social posts over the weekend about possible new actions to address crime levels that he argues are dangerous for citizens, tourists and workers alike. The White House declined to offer additional details about Monday’s announcement.
The police department and the mayor’s office did not respond to questions about what Trump might do next.
The president criticized the district as full of “tents, squalor, filth, and Crime,” and he seems to have been set off by the attack on Edward Coristine, among the most visible figures of the bureaucracy-cutting effort known as DOGE. Police arrested two 15-year-olds in the attempted carjacking and said they were looking for others.
“This has to be the best run place in the country, not the worst run place in the country,” Trump said Wednesday.
The president called Bowser “a good person who has tried, but she has been given many chances.”
Trump has repeatedly suggested that the rule of Washington could be returned to federal authorities. Doing so would require a repeal of the Home Rule Act of 1973 in Congress, a step Trump said lawyers are examining. It could face steep pushback.
Bowser acknowledged that the law allows the president to take more control over the city’s police, but only if certain conditions are met.
“None of those conditions exist in our city right now,” she said. “We are not experiencing a spike in crime. In fact, we’re watching our crime numbers go down.”
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Associated Press writers Ashraf Khalil and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.
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