They were unmissable that day in March at the U.S. Capitol — the loudest voices, the tiniest faces, the most rabid consumers of candy in the jars at the front desk of virtually every Senate office.
They were an estimated 700 to 1,000 D.C. schoolchildren, their parents and teachers, and other passionate residents who flooded the halls of Congress to plead with senators to reverse course on a $1.1 billion cut to D.C.’s local budget midway through the school year. They were unavoidable as they crowded inside the Senate offices and sat on the tile floor of the Hart Building atrium, coloring signs and posters that said, “Don’t defund our school!” and “Congress: stay away from D.C.’s money.”
LaJoy Johnson-Law (Ward 8), the D.C. school board member who along with three other Ward 8 moms organized the historic “Recess at the Capitol” demonstration, called it the “largest family movement I have ever seen in the history of D.C.”
“I think that was the great intersectionality of where joy meets concern,” she said. “Where joy meets advocacy. Where joy meets ‘I’m not going to be silenced. I’m going to stand up for my city.’”
The event was just one of the countless ways that D.C. residents mobilized in ways big and small during a year like no other for the District, which experienced what many see as its greatest home rule challenges in a half-century. 2025 began with Congress’s massive budget cut and is ending with the ongoing surge of federal law enforcement, immigration officers and National Guard troops. Challenges were compounded by economic hurdles caused by the Trump administration’s mass firings of federal workers, and as immigrant-heavy industries such as restaurants took hits.
In between, residents organized walking school buses to take immigrant children to school and neighborhood watch groups to alert immigrants to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They volunteered for food drives. They marched down 16th Street during the “We Are All D.C.”demonstration Sept. 6, chanting “Free D.C.” and hoisting D.C. flags in perhaps the loudest collective display of city pride this year.
“This was the year of us standing up and standing together, of linking together, speaking out for and with each other — just showing that we are D.C.,” said Allyson Criner Brown, another of the Ward 8 parents who organized “Recess at the Capitol” and who stays involved in the Free DC movement. “Like, there is a collective D.C., and I think collective D.C. was really active this year and came together in ways that we have not done — in ways that we always had the potential for, and this brought some of the best out of us.”
As the year comes to a close, longtime D.C. home rule advocates, officials and everyday residents alike reflected on the magnitude of home rule challenges of 2025, and how the city responded.
Home rule, then and now
Julius Hobson Jr. remembers Christmas Eve 1973 when President Richard M. Nixon signed the Home Rule Act, giving D.C. a locally elected mayor and council.
“Initially there was a lot of euphoria,” said Hobson, who worked for decades on D.C. federal affairs both in the mayor’s office and in Congress, and whose father was a prominent civil rights fighter in the District who served on the first D.C. Council.
But almost immediately, Hobson said, it became clear how “precarious” the concept of limited home rule really was, given that federal oversight remained and that the city’s laws were still subject to it. That created an enduring democratic conundrum, he said, in which D.C.’s elected officials always would be caught between two constituencies: the people who elected them, and the people who oversaw the city, who could take away home rule at any time.
“It doesn’t matter who the mayor was, from Walter Washington to Muriel Bowser — this was always a problem,” he said.
Hobson saw this year, however, as the “most difficult” period for home rule, given the scope and number of bills that Republicans in Congress are trying to pass — more than a dozen, mostly seeking to overhaul D.C. criminal justice policies — and the extent to which President Donald Trump has gone to exert his will on the city.
Cora Masters Barry, whose husband, the late Marion Barry, served four terms as mayor, said what is happening now harks back to the pre-home-rule era. She pointed to “the hostile racial overtones and the demeaning of the citizens and the character of the city” from Republicans during a House Oversight Committee hearing in September, in which they painted the District as a crime-ridden hellscape.
Some observers look back at D.C.’s time under a federally ordered financial control board in the 1990s as the last time it experienced such intense federal intervention. But Barry said that felt different. The board was made up of smart, devoted D.C. residents trying to right the city’s finances, she said.
“You still never got the feeling that they were against us. They were your neighbors, you know?” she said. “And this is different, in the sense that it’s not necessarily trying to take our rights as it is trying to take over the control of the city. Especially as it relates to law enforcement, and that’s very scary.”
Beverly Perry, who served as a special adviser to Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) for 10 years until this October, said that when Trump took office, Bowser and her deputies looked for ways to keep Trump at bay by partnering on some requests. He wanted to see manicured lawns. Illuminated tunnels with polished tiles. Homeless encampments cleaned up.
The thinking was, Perry said, “If this is satisfactory, then you don’t need to be involved.”
Then came Aug. 11, the morning Trump announced at a news conference that he was declaring a crime emergency in the nation’s capital, seizing control over the D.C. police for 30 days and deploying the National Guard. The mayor had no notice.
A comment from one official in a meeting that day stood out in Perry’s memory: “This is not about D.C. — D.C. is just the test case” — the city where Trump had more power than any other jurisdiction.
Some activists in D.C. turned up the pressure on Bowser to speak out more loudly against Trump and show greater resistance. Perry said that is not Bowser’s style — “the mayor is a diplomat,” she said — and she did not believe that approach would protect home rule.
“Home rule was granted to the city by simple statute. It can be taken away, repealed, by a simple vote,” Perry said. “That is how fragile it is, and people who don’t understand that fragility, it’s a sad day.”
Bowser repeatedly described home rule as her “North Star” in the decisions she was making, even if residents disagreed.
Once asked this fall how she would repair the “spirit of D.C.” after a grueling year, Bowser answered, “I think the spirit of D.C. is alive and well.”
“Every neighborhood I go in, when I see the D.C. flag, I know that the spirit is alive and well, and D.C. people, just like any other — well, I think more — are concerned about their neighbors and want to stand up for their neighbors,” she said.
A collective D.C.
Ten-year-old Ellen Wendel had never been inside the Capitol before, but that day in March she would learn what all D.C. residents do at some point: why their city is so different.
She made a poster that said, “Pass the D.C. Local Funds Act!” — the bill that would reverse the $1.1 billion cut to D.C.’s budget. And along with her entire class at Lee Montessori Public Charter School, she went from office to office, for three hours, urging senators and their staff to do just that. She told them she didn’t want her teachers to lose their jobs.
One day later, the U.S. Senate listened — and unanimously passed the bill.
Ellen and her classmates were ecstatic, she said, feeling like they made a difference. (The House, however, would not follow suit, ultimately requiring D.C. to make various budget maneuvers to avert the worst outcomes.)
“I learned I should always make my voice be heard,” Ellen said, “and not just stand in the shadows and watch, like, the world be changed.”
In a city with little autonomy, residents of all ages discovered the power of their individual agency in diverse ways, said Criner Brown, one of the parent organizers. “They understood that there was a role that they could play, that there was something they could contribute,” she said.
For some it was through the Free DC organization, which exploded this year with a ubiquitous presence at the Capitol and in demonstrations. For others it was through neighborhood activism.
Tara Sun Vanacore, president of the Parent Teacher Organization at a Columbia Heights elementary school, felt the pull in the direct aftermath of Trump’s August emergency declaration, in which he also dispatched ICE agents across the city. Columbia Heights felt like “the epicenter of ICE activity,” she said. “That was when, you know, we were really scrambling to think about how we were going to protect our families.”
In the beginning, the principal and teachers personally escorted some immigrant children from their apartments to the school, she said, as parents were afraid to leave home, seeing ICE detentions unfolding. (The Washington Post is not identifying the school because of those fears.) Sun Vanacore said she organized know-your-rights training because the Bowser administration was not distributing any information materials. And with the help of parent volunteers, she tried to set up a walking school bus, though some families were still afraid to even walk to meetup points.
They saw the most uptake, she said, with the food drive. It aided struggling immigrant families as well as those feeling the heat of the city’s economic woes, such as scores of federal workers who were laid off — a confluence of so many of the city’s challenges this year, Sun Vanacore said. Donations from the community flooded in — and continue to. “I was just emailing today with the resource coordinator saying, Can the school handle this kind of influx of donations?” she said recently. “It’s been really gratifying to see the community come together in that way.”
The faith community stepped up as well. The Rev. William Lamar IV, pastor at Metropolitan AME Church who organizes with the Washington Interfaith Network, said numerous congregations had an alert system to let immigrants know if ICE was spotted on their routes to church on Sunday mornings. His majority-Black congregation was hit hardest by the federal worker layoffs, and parishioners stepped up to provide financial aid.
Kristi Matthews, executive director of the D.C. Girls Coalition, worked with several groups to set up “safe spaces” for youth after school — a blending of activities like poetry and artwork with training sessions on how to talk to police, as Black and Brown youth in particular felt nervous encountering so many more officers in their neighborhoods, she said.
“What was beautiful about our young people is they decided to stand up and stand together,” Matthews said. “We had young people experiencing all kinds of things. We had young people whose family members were getting disappeared by ICE. We had people whose family members were getting detained for various reasons, and all while that is happening, they’re still showing up.”
Other Washingtonians encountered city solidarity in everyday life.
Free DC started a trend of nightly pot-banging, a form of protest with a long international history, and on many nights in the Wendel family’s Brookland neighborhood, it got loud. Ellen helped. Katie Wendel, Ellen’s mom, said she was sure there were probably bigger ways to get involved — but through this one small act, she said, she could feel the pride of a city.
“As challenging as this year has been,” she said, “in so many ways I think it just has also been an opportunity to see how many great people live in D.C. And care about D.C.”
Jenny Gathright contributed to this report.
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