I was sitting on a restaurant patio on Capitol Hill with a friend last Monday when a motorist was pulled over by local police officers right in front of us. Within minutes, unmarked cars and federal agents — some wearing vests marked with the initials of Homeland Security Investigations and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — surrounded his vehicle. Once outside the car, he was placed in handcuffs. He was released after several concerned diners approached the agents.
A few days before that, I stepped outside to walk my dog and was surprised to see Homeland Security Investigations agents patrolling my block. By the time I got back to my apartment, they had surrounded a young woman in front of my building. She was not resisting arrest. The agents placed her in hand and leg cuffs bound together by chains. My neighbors and I watched as they whisked her away in an unmarked vehicle.
I don’t know who these people were or why they were targeted. But I’ve lived in Washington, D.C., for over a decade, and I have never seen anything as chaotic as this on our streets. Most federal agents — like the ones I saw from H.S.I. and A.T.F. — do not normally conduct immigration checks or pull over drivers for traffic violations. Their job is to dismantle drug cartels, arrest arms traffickers and combat child exploitation and human trafficking rings in the United States.
President Trump said the takeover of policing and the deployment of National Guard members here were needed to restore law and order. Then Pam Bondi, the attorney general, pointed to district officials’ unwillingness to cooperate with immigration officials.
The administration has threatened to deploy federal agents to other cities, where the White House has amplified concerns about crime, criticized sanctuary policies and challenged political opposition. On Monday the president issued an executive order that attempts to create specially trained National Guard units that could be deployed in all 50 states in the name of public safety.
These increasingly muddled objectives point to a broader agenda: The president may be using Washington as a testing ground for expanding federal control over local law enforcement nationwide. Once that infrastructure is in place, little would prevent it from being turned against civilians.
While the violent crime rate in my adopted city is the lowest it’s been in years, Washington, like so many cities, still has a long way to go in making people feel safe. Many residents, including myself, don’t think the city has done enough to reduce gun violence, combat homelessness or address youth crime.
Still, if Mr. Trump truly cared about the well-being of the residents, he would instead work with Congress to restore the $1.1 billion it cut from the city’s budget — funds that would have gone to community services that advance public safety, such as the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, youth mental health programming and support for victims of domestic violence.
But it seems the president cares less about reducing crime than he does about using federal law enforcement to chill dissent or retaliate against people who question his agenda. One way we’re seeing this play out is the use of immigration officials to arrest or try to intimidate elected officials who are simply doing their jobs or to pick up trash around Lafayette Park.
In May a group of elected Democratic officials from New Jersey, including Representative LaMonica McIver, were initially blocked from visiting an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility — despite members of Congress having the legal authority to conduct unannounced visits to such centers. She has since been indicted on charges stemming from the incident. In June, Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California, was forcibly removed, tackled and handcuffed by federal agents after attempting to ask a question at a news conference held by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.
This month, Ms. Bondi sent a letter to over 30 mayors and governors threatening to prosecute them for not being sufficiently supportive of immigration enforcement. On Aug. 14, Border Patrol agents showed up in downtown Los Angeles at a rally and press event that Gov. Gavin Newsom was holding on congressional redistricting.
None of these people are threats to public safety or national security, which Mr. Trump is claiming to be his concern. These individuals are all being caught in the web of the president’s federal enforcement machine.
A Washington Post/Schar School poll conducted last week found that a majority of residents said they opposed the president’s moves. To the public, these arrests appear arbitrary, fueling tense scenes across the city, where residents are angrily shouting at agents and National Guard members, demanding they get out. Grand juries have declined to issue indictments in certain cases, including one in which a man was accused of throwing a sandwich at a federal agent.
While all this is unfolding in our city, the local economy is taking a hit. Businesses, especially bars and restaurants, have reported a decrease in revenue and foot traffic. Data from OpenTable shows that since the president federalized our police department, restaurants here have experienced a 24 percent drop in reservations compared with the same time last year.
The president was never supposed to have a personal militia. Members of Congress took an oath to defend the Constitution and uphold our democracy, not give the president unfettered resources to police civilians. At a minimum, they should back the resolution introduced by Representatives Jamie Raskin and Eleanor Holmes Norton to terminate the crime emergency Mr. Trump declared and condemn the chaos this federal deployment has caused. Only 56 Democrats have cosponsored the resolution so far.
Mr. Trump doesn’t make anyone safer by sending National Guard members and federal agents into cities. Instead, he’s sowing confusion and stretching presidential power well beyond its constitutional limits. These moves are also a misuse of the men and women who joined the National Guard or federal law enforcement agencies to defend the country — not to intimidate their fellow citizens.
Do we really want to live in a country where the president can unilaterally deploy federal forces into cities that neither need nor request them? If we allow this expansion of power to go unchecked, we risk a future in which those federal agents can be turned against any one of us.
Andrea R. Flores, a lawyer, was an immigration policy adviser in the Obama and Biden administrations.
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