The Trump administration’s crackdown on crime in Washington has been propelled, in part, by an aggressive clampdown on guns, with city and federal officials confiscating around 150 weapons since the president declared a crime emergency in the capital nearly three weeks ago.
“I’m pleased to report another 105 arrests have been made and 12 illegal guns taken off the streets of Washington, DC,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on social media on Thursday. It was part of her near-daily tally of gun seizures, an effort spearheaded by Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Under almost any other president, heralding a gun sweep would not be notable. But the shift toward gun enforcement — and publicizing the aggressive street sweeps — marks an abrupt departure for an administration that has courted Second Amendment maximalists and sharply downgraded federal firearms enforcement.
President Trump’s political appointees rolled back Biden-era regulations and diverted officials assigned to weapons cases to immigration raids. The White House has also proposed steep cuts to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and installed disengaged, inexperienced leaders to oversee its increasingly marginalized work force.
While these moves have not exposed major political divisions, they have caused some uneasiness among gun-rights supporters who are concerned that law-and-order officials like Ms. Pirro, who once supported restrictions on assault rifles, will create a chilling effect on legal gun owners in the district and in the surrounding area.
“It sends a message we don’t like,” said Luis Valdes, the Florida director of Gun Owners of America, an influential gun rights group that has pushed for the repeal of most federal gun laws.
It is not clear how many of the guns confiscated by the city’s Metropolitan Police Department or federal law enforcement agencies have resulted in prosecutions, or how many cases were later dropped. In at least one case, Ms. Pirro’s office withdrew firearms charges against a person found to possess two guns after the search was determined to have possibly violated Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure.
What is clear, however, is that gun cases are a central component of the federal government’s push into Washington. A New York Times review of about 1,000 arrests suggested only a slight increase in the overall number of arrests compared with the period before the surge, but pointed to a major increase in federal firearms prosecutions.
Since entering office, Mr. Trump’s team has taken steps to roll back many Biden administration regulations intended to expand criminal background checks for gun purchasers, and reduce the availability of deadly homemade firearms and accessories that convert semiautomatic firearms into machine guns.
To say that the A.T.F., responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws and tracing guns used in crimes, has been an afterthought would be an understatement. Mr. Trump has not yet appointed a permanent director, and he tapped the current Army secretary for the job in April after the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, told associates he had no interest in filling the position.
Earlier this year, the White House floated a plan to merge the A.T.F. with the Drug Enforcement Administration, another small and besieged law enforcement agency tucked inside the Justice Department. It appears to be going nowhere.
In June, the Justice Department quietly issued a plan to slash by two-thirds the number of inspectors who monitor federally licensed gun dealers, sharply limiting the government’s already crimped capacity to identify businesses that sell guns to criminals.
The department plans to eliminate 541 of the estimated 800 investigators responsible for determining whether federally licensed dealers are following federal laws and regulations intended to keep guns away from traffickers, straw purchasers, criminals and those found to have severe mental illness.
Many agents in the A.T.F.’s already understaffed field offices have been assigned to provide support for immigration enforcement actions across the country, which has reduced the bureau’s capacity to bring gun cases, according to several federal law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Those same officials are now expressing measured hope that the emphasis on investigating gun crime in Washington will lead to similar initiatives in their cities.
And even with all those challenges, productive collaborations between local law enforcement and the federal authorities — often in the form of gang, drug and gun-trafficking task forces — are proceeding without fanfare, quietly churning out dozens of arrests and prosecutions.
Ms. Pirro, for her part, has dismissed suggestions that Justice Department cuts would affect her work, recently telling a reporter who asked about proposed reductions to criminal justice programs to “stop it!”
A Trump loyalist and former Fox News co-host, Ms. Pirro has grown increasingly conservative over the years. She was part of a generation of law-and-order Republicans in the Northeast in the 1990s — led by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the mayor of New York at the time — who promoted aggressive policing policies during an era when violent crime rates were far higher than they are now.
An element of that strategy was an emphasis on increasing police head counts and visibility. It also used minor infractions — broken taillights or illegal tinting on cars, drinking alcohol from open containers, the whiff of marijuana smoke — as justification to conduct searches for drugs, cash and weapons.
Then as now, Ms. Pirro, the longtime Westchester County district attorney, supported aggressive enforcement of firearms laws, data sharing between state and local partners, expanding background checks and a national ban on assault weapons — positions once acceptable in the Republican Party and now anathema to many gun rights groups.
“I believe in the Second Amendment strongly,” she said in 2004, “but there is no legitimate purpose in possessing an assault weapon other than to kill as many people as quickly as possible.”
Ms. Pirro backtracked over the years as her party lurched rightward on guns. And last month, she announced that her office would no longer seek felony charges for possession of rifles or shotguns, a policy shift that was applauded by gun rights groups.
The move came at the urging of White House officials, according to a person familiar with the situation. Moreover, it appears to be more politically symbolic than consequential from a law enforcement perspective. City police officers are still free to prosecute offenders found to possess unregistered long guns — and around 95 percent of the firearms seized in the capital are handguns, according to an analysis of A.T.F. data by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom focused on gun violence.
District officials, who are concerned that the White House will take even more drastic steps to reduce their autonomy, have been guardedly supportive of increased federal firearms enforcement. Mayor Muriel Bowser has developed an amicable working relationship with Ms. Pirro, whom she has privately described as respectful, according to people close to both.
But the larger question is whether the surge will really have an effect on crime in the capital comparable to its political shock-and-awe value.
Ms. Bowser has said the modest improvements in street crime are simply the result of having more law enforcement officers on the street. But such fluctuations tend to be temporary. The gangs and crews that account for many of the guns flooding Washington have proved highly adaptable over time, critics of the crackdown say, and they will simply wait to re-emerge until the federal presence diminishes or disappears.
“What we’re seeing from Donald Trump is political theater, not a crime-fighting strategy,” said John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
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