President Trump has overseen an expansive effort this month to take control of law enforcement in Washington, carrying out a conspicuous show of force in the nation’s capital in what he has described as an effort to combat crime.
The most attention-grabbing component of that takeover has been his initial deployment of more than 800 D.C. National Guard troops, with another 1,000 coming from Republican-led states. That deployment, echoing Mr. Trump’s deployment of Guard troops in California to support immigration raids earlier this year, has been part of a wider effort by the president to meld military operations with domestic law enforcement, particularly in his immigration crackdown.
But so far, the National Guard has operated primarily in a support role in Washington. Guardsmen deployed in the city have mostly stayed in tourist-heavy areas near national monuments and transit hubs, and have so far done little to directly enforce the law. There have been some exceptions: National Guard lawyers have been transferred to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, essentially acting as low-level civilian prosecutors.
Instead, the National Guard presence primarily supports a smaller force of roughly 500 federal law enforcement agents that have more actively participated in Mr. Trump’s crackdown on crime.
Those agents have roamed the district on patrol, set up checkpoints to stop and search vehicles and have occasionally evicted homeless people from city streets in a highly visible effort to make arrests and project the administration’s show of force. The White House has lauded their efforts in daily news releases, tallying more than 600 arrests over a two-week period — many of them for immigration violations. In the last two weeks before Mr. Trump commandeered the city’s police, 1,182 arrests were made.
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The post See Trump’s Use of Federal Law Enforcement in D.C. appeared first on New York Times.
