Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday praised National Guard members stationed in D.C., claiming they had reduced the city’s crime rates by “staggering amounts,” as dozens of protesters nearby criticized the months-long deployment.
With the backdrop of Meridian Hill Park’s cascading fountain — fixed this spring to flow for the first time in seven years — Hegseth said the Guard members’ service in the nation’s capital made them the “real” 1 percent.
“There’s a lot of famous people in this town, but when I talk about elites, I’m talking about all of you,” he said. “You stand beside law enforcement here and you ensure that our capital is safe and secure. It’s a righteous and beautiful mission.”
Hegseth appeared alongside other Trump officials, including White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, at the federal park, also known as Malcolm X Park, to recognize the work of the administration’s D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force.
So far this year, D.C. has had about the same number of violent crimes as at this time in 2025. Property crimes, including burglary from cars and motor vehicle theft, have decreased by about a quarter from this time last year, according to D.C. police data. When President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard last year, crime rates were near a six-year low.
As Hegseth took his place to speak in front of hundreds of National Guard troops, protesters lined up with banners and bullhorns along Florida Avenue and on 16th Street NW outside the locked-down park. They shouted “Guard go home!” and wrote tributes in sidewalk chalk to Julian Bailey, a D.C. man who was fatally shot by a U.S. marshal in February.
Free DC, which was formed after Trump’s inauguration last year and is the leading opposition group to federal interference in the capital, organized protesters around the park’s perimeter — though several passersby joined the demonstrators once they learned who was speaking, said Keya Chatterjee, a Free DC co-founder.
“Events like this actually usually make us grow bigger because it’s so unsettling for people to see this kind of armed presence, this sort of visual and visceral attack on democracy where it just looks like stormtroopers” at the park, Chatterjee said in an interview.
The protesters’ chants threatened to drown out the secretary’s words — and drew a rebuke from Hegseth.
“This background noise this morning is perfect,” he said. “It’s the sound of ingrates, of ingratitude, of people who are so blinded by ideology they can’t see law and order and common sense in front of them. There’s nothing ideological about this group. There’s nothing political about this exercise.”
A National Guard representative said the troops in D.C. have saved 235 lives, medically assisted 530 people and returned 27 lost children to families since deployment. The ceremony included a moment of silence for Sarah Beckstrom, a 20-year-old Guard member who was shot and killed while on duty downtown in November.
Trump deployed the National Guard in August last year to patrol Washington’s streets in a flex of federal power that included temporarily seizing control of the city’s police force. Months earlier, he launched the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force to merge efforts of the National Guard; FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and D.C. police to surge officers in public areas, maximize immigration enforcement and beautify federal properties.
The Pentagon this spring announced that it would double the number of National Guard troops deployed in D.C. to about 5,000 in a “summer surge” ahead of celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday. It plans to maintain a presence in the capital through at least early 2029.
“All of civilization can be fundamentally divided into two groups of people: builders and destroyers,” Miller, the White House aide, said at the ceremony Thursday. “Between the people who do the work to build, sustain and nurture civilization, the people who serve, who sacrifice, who give, who care for others … and those who only destroy, who litter, who rob, who graffiti, who deface, who degrade.”
“Civilization only exists because of people like you,” he told the Guard troops.
Acting attorney general Todd Blanche said the impact of the Guard’s work in D.C. justified the cost of the deployment — about $1.65 million per day, according to a February report by the Democratic staff on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
“It’s not just the reduction in crime, but the beautification of the city, the improvement of the quality of life, the cleanliness of the city, the order of the city,” Blanche said. “You cannot put a price tag on that.”
Meridian Hill Park has long served as a gathering place for locals, and on Sundays a passerby may see it used for picnics, yoga classes, drum circles, pickup soccer games and protests, sometimes all at once.
The National Park Service said in March that the grassy fields on its top level would be closed for months for restoration, spawning criticism from community members. In May, the lower level of the park fully reopened. The “Safe and Beautiful” banners came down, and the water in its cascading fountain started flowing again.
The park, which straddles the Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights neighborhoods, has a long history of social activism, from ’60s civil rights protests to black militant rallies in the ’80s to recent No Kings gatherings. On Thursday, protester and Ward 1 resident Ericka Hume, 33, was among the dozens to gather outside the park’s secured perimeter.
“Pete Hegseth coming to the park that is a community place to talk about beauty when he’s terrorizing D.C. and nationals abroad does not sit right with the D.C. community,” she said.
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