In an expansion of tactics started in June during immigration raids in Los Angeles, President Trump on Monday announced he would activate 800 National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. to help “reestablish law and order” and “take the capital back.”
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people,” Trump said at the White House briefing room.
“It’s liberation day in D.C.,” he declared.
Trump, who sent roughly 5,000 Marines and National Guard troops to L.A. in June in a move that was opposed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, is invoking section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, that places the D.C. Metropolitan police Department under direct federal control.
Trump painted D.C. as a grimy hell-hole and said his administration has already begun to remove homeless people from encampments across the city. He vowed to “restore the city back to the gleaming capital that everybody wants it to be.”
“If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty,” he said. “We’re going to make it clean.”
Although the president cited issues of violent crime in Washington — stating the city is “totally out of control” — data show violent crime has declined significantly in recent years.
Just a few weeks before before Trump took office, the Justice Department announced that violent crime in the city was at a 30-year low. Homicides were down 32%, robberies down 39% and armed carjackings down 53% when compared with 2023 levels, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department.
He also issued a warning to Los Angeles.
“Hopefully L.A.’s watching,” Trump said as he berated Bass and Newsom for their handling of the firestorm that swept through the region in January, destroying thousands of homes.
“The mayor’s incompetent and so is Gov. Newscum,” Trump said, renewing his criticism of local officials for not accelerating rebuilding and the permitting process after the disaster. “He’s got a good line of bullshit, but that’s it.”
Trump’s announcement that he was deploying troops to D.C comes two months after he sparked a major legal battle with California when he sent thousands of troops to L.A. He argued they were necessary to combat what he described as “violent, insurrectionist mobs” as protests broke out in the city against federal immigration raids.
But the protests calmed relatively quickly and local officials said they were primarily kept in check by local police. The National Guard troops and Marines wound up sparsely deployed in L.A. Some protected federal buildings, but most remained at the Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos.
Some of the deployed personnel assisted federal agents as they conducted immigration enforcement operations, but military officials said the troops were restricted to security and crowd control and had no law enforcement authority. The National Guard played a role in both the convoy that descended on MacArthur Park and the raid of cannabis farms in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.
In June, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco ruled that Trump broke the law when he mobilized thousands of California National Guard members against the state’s wishes.
In a 36-page U.S. District Court decision, Breyer wrote that Trump’s actions “were illegal — both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution.” Breyer added that he was “troubled by the implication” inherent in the Trump administration’s argument that “protest against the federal government, a core civil liberty protected by the First Amendment, can justify a finding of rebellion.”
But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals paused that court order, allowing the troops to remain in Los Angeles while the case plays out in federal court. The appellate court found the president had broad, though not “unreviewable,” authority to deploy the military in American cities.
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