Juan Carlos Dela Torre had already experienced one run-in with one of the roving crews of federal law enforcement agents who descended on Washington, D.C., this month. Then on Friday night came another.
He was standing on the sidewalk smoking a joint, which the officers grabbed as evidence of “consuming marijuana in a public space,” a misdemeanor in the district. The officers took him to a local police station, searched him and, they said, found a small amount of the stimulant MDMA. He was sent to jail.
“I’ve never seen this much police presence in my whole life,” said Mr. Dela Torre, 37, a massage therapist who has lived in Washington since 1994. “You guys are worried about some guy smoking a joint on the corner on a Friday night?”
President Trump declared that crime in Washington was “out of control” earlier this month and said he would use the power of the federal government to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor — and worse.”
But a review by The New York Times of about a thousand arrests that were made during the first two weeks of the federal law enforcement surge suggests that the operation has been more of a sprawling dragnet than a targeted crime-fighting operation.
Records show that officers from some of the nation’s most elite federal law enforcement agencies are often conducting traffic stops, performing low-dollar buy-and-bust drug operations or checking to see whether someone is drinking liquor from an open container.
In some ways, the focus on low-level offenses or so-called quality of life crimes resembles strategies employed in cities such as New York in the 1990s that sought to drive down crime by controlling visible disorder. In the current operation, however, federal agents appeared to be stopping people for minor infractions as a way to look for more serious drug and gun offenses.
Arrests were up slightly overall, with 995 new criminal defendants booked into the city jail and taken to court between Aug. 8, the day after the surge began, and Aug. 22, compared with 870 in the previous 15-day period.
Prosecutors did not pursue charges in all cases. When they did, gun and drug charges together accounted for more than half of the arrests in which federal agents took part. That includes some charges against people who were licensed to carry weapons in other states but lacked a D.C. permit.
Traffic offenses and other minor violations, like possessing an open container of alcohol on the street, made up another 18 percent of the total.
Nine percent of cases in which federal agents were mentioned involved responding to violent or property crimes. In addition to that, federal agents have also executed scores of warrants, picking up people who were already wanted in the district or elsewhere on murder, drug trafficking or kidnapping charges.
Officials from the Trump administration boast that violent crime has plummeted by more than 45 percent and property crimes by 12 percent since the federal push began. Local officials point out that while crime was already declining beforehand, the drops in some categories, including robbery and carjacking, have steepened since the push started.
“We already had good momentum coming into the federal surge, and it made it better,” said Kevin Donahue, the city administrator.
But experts caution against reading too much into short-term fluctuations in crime statistics, especially since the heavy law enforcement presence may have simply prompted people to stay off the streets.
The Times reviewed arrest records for about 1,000 people taken into custody during the surge, and was able to examine arrest affidavits in more than 500 cases, detailing their circumstances. The affidavits are one of the few available windows into what role federal agents are playing in criminal arrests in the district.
Federal officers appeared to be involved in fewer than a third of the arrests. In the vast majority of cases, officers initiated contact themselves, and were not responding to a call or instructions from dispatchers. These encounters included traffic stops for minor infractions like having darkly tinted windows or double parking, as well as cases where a cup or container that might hold alcohol could be seen inside a vehicle.
The court records suggest that these stops typically led to a search, and the search often led to the discovery of drugs or guns. The White House said on Thursday that 135 guns had been recovered since Aug. 7.
In addition to the people whose arrests are in the court records, more than 400 people suspected of being in the country illegally have been picked up by federal immigration agents in Washington over the past three weeks. Their whereabouts, and the status of their cases, are much harder to track.
As a result of the sweeps, the population of the city’s violent and understaffed jail is higher than it has been in years, an outcome that does not appear to be of concern to federal officials involved in the crackdown.
“The last thing I’m worried about is an overcrowded jail,” said Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington. Ordered to bring maximum criminal charges against everyone who is arrested, prosecutors in Ms. Pirro’s short-staffed office are keeping the city’s arraignment court open past 1 a.m. on many days. “The thing I’m worried about,” Ms. Pirro said, “is the people in D.C. who feel like they’re in jail because the criminals are running around.”
While D.C. officials have been critical of immigration arrests and the growing number of National Guard soldiers in the city, they have expressed support for the increase in federal law enforcement. The city’s chief of police told reporters that from traffic stops to foot patrols, the federal teams were carrying out crime-fighting strategies that were developed by the local police in response to residents’ concerns.
“Let me put it this way,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said at a news conference on Wednesday. “If there were 500 additional M.P.D. officers, that same activity, arrests and gun recoveries, would have likely been made.”
Still, not everyone in D.C. feels reassured.
Jawana Hardy, 35, recalled seeing a platoon of law enforcement agents march into a cookout in her neighborhood on a recent Friday night, asking people to show what was in their pockets or in the cups they were holding. “You would think more police would make people safer,” she said. “But it is bringing a sense of fear in the community.”
Even some of people who welcomed the prospect of more law enforcement said they found the aggressive tactics to be counterproductive.
“People who are not the problem are being locked up to create optics,” said Ron Moten, a longtime anti-violence activist in the district who has pushed for more proactive policing. “It’s making good everyday working people afraid to walk in the District of Columbia.”
Of the arrestees whose race is noted in records over the past two weeks, the overwhelming majority are Black. This was also true for the D.C. police force’s arrests in 2023 and 2024, a markedly disproportionate share for a city where Black people make up a little more than 40 percent of the population.
While arrests involving federal agents took place in all eight of the city’s wards, about 30 percent were in Ward 8, the area with the highest number of violent crimes.
The steepening decline in crime in such areas may be short-term, a result in part of people’s fear of getting caught up in the dragnet, according to Jeff Asher, an expert on crime trends. Moreover, he said, if heavy-handed policing breaks the trust between the community and law enforcement, it could lead to worse consequences down the road.
“Arresting people, especially first-time offenders, and throwing the book at them for minor offenses: We know these things don’t work, and we had over a decade of seeing that they don’t work,” he said.
The arrest affidavits filed in court provide a detailed look at some of the work federal agents are doing in the district.
At about 1 a.m. on a recent Saturday, one affidavit says, local police officers working with F.B.I. and Homeland Security Investigations agents made contact with a group of people in an area of the city where there are several clubs and bars. The officers noticed a young man holding a plastic cup and moving to enter a tobacco shop. They arrested him for possession of an open container of alcohol.
Like many of those who have been cuffed over the past two weeks, the young man had been arrested before. He is facing a pending gun charge from earlier this year. Mr. Dela Torre, the man who was arrested for smoking marijuana and drug possession, had also faced misdemeanor charges in the past.
In another operation last week, Homeland Security agents, Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local police officers engaged in a classic undercover buy-bust operation, though hardly of the magnitude they might typically handle. An officer bought $20 worth of cocaine from a 58-year-old man, and officers then arrested him when he walked into a nearby liquor store.
A few days later, police officers and plain-clothed federal agents were on a residential block when they approached a 27-year-old man who they said was smoking a joint. The officers ran his name through a database and discovered that he had missed a court date in 2017 for a charge of destroying property worth less than $1,000. He was arrested and charged with an additional crime of failing to appear.
Often, though, the stops have resulted in more serious charges. On Aug. 9, three U.S. Park Police officers patrolling in Southeast D.C. approached a car and saw an open bottle of tequila on the floor. As they confronted the two men in the car about it, one officer saw a Glock pistol with an extended magazine inside the car. The two men were arrested on felony gun-related charges — as well as a violation of the open container law.
More than half of the recorded arrests involving federal agents came after the discovery of drugs or guns. For example, late last Friday, a large group of officers from agencies including the F.B.I., D.E.A., ICE and the Secret Service got out of their cars to approach a 45-year-old man who was sitting in a lawn chair and drinking wine from a small bottle. They arrested him for drinking in public, which allowed them to carry out a search. In his waistband, they said they found a handgun, and crack cocaine in a satchel he was carrying.
In nearly all the records of these arrests, officers say that their suspicions were confirmed by a pat-down or a search.
What is impossible to know, however, and what is troubling many law-abiding D.C. residents, is how many such stops are being made that do not end in the discovery of anything illegal.
At a rally on Friday night in Southeast D.C., which has some of the city’s highest crime rates, LaShay Makal, an assistant chief in the Metropolitan Police, warned young people to expect a more robust police presence.
“It is very likely you’ll come in contact with agents and military more,” she said. Execution of warrants has “increased tenfold” since the federal push began, she said.
Kimberly Mitchell, a grandmother, had come to the rally to learn more about the surge of federal agents and what sort of advice she could bring back to her children. She was left wondering whether she should be doing things differently herself.
“I just got my windows tinted,” Ms. Mitchell said. Tinted windows kept her car cool during the hot D.C. summer, and besides, they looked good, she said. She had spent $175.
“Now I want to get it taken off.”
Emily Badger, Miles G. Cohen, Aishvarya Kavi, Clyde McGrady, Alyce McFadden, Steven Moity, Zach Montague, Christina Morales and Davaughnia Wilson contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice. He is from upstate New York.
Jeff Adelson is a reporter on The Times’s data journalism team who specializes in using demographic data to explore social trends, population dynamics and the effects of policy.
Campbell Robertson reports for The Times on Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
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