President Trump has ordered an unspecified number of federal law enforcement agents to be deployed in Washington, D.C., days after threatening a federal takeover of the city and claiming that crime there was “totally out of control.”
Washington’s crime rates — ranging from violent crime to thefts and burglaries — have been falling significantly, but the order follows the president’s effort to paint the nation’s capital as rife with violent crime. Mr. Trump highlighted the beating earlier this week of a prominent Department of Government Efficiency employee by a mob of young assailants in an attempted carjacking, according to local police.
“If D.C. doesn’t get its act together,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Tuesday, “we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City.”
The deployment, starting Friday at 12:01 a.m., would include law enforcement officers from a wide swath of agencies across the federal government. They include: Immigration police tasked with deportations, the F.B.I., U.S. marshals, the Drug Enforcement Administration and twelve other federal agencies.
It is unclear how many agents will be part of the surge and in what parts of the city. A statement from the White House said that the deployment “will be focused on high traffic tourist areas and other known hotspots,” a category that could be broadly interpreted to include much of the city.
The White House also said that officers “will be identified, in marked units, and highly visible,” an apparent reference to concerns about the aggressive tactics of masked immigration police who have been filmed swarming people on the street, arresting them with zip ties and bundling them into unmarked vehicles.
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