One month ago, President Trump declared that “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” in Washington, D.C., represented such a dire emergency that he was placing the local police department “under direct federal control.” The announcement, coming a year and a half into a steady decline in D.C.’s violent crime rates, was one of the most aggressive encroachments on Washington’s self-government since Congress passed the D.C. Home Rule Act more than five decades ago.
At the stroke of midnight on Wednesday, that particular intervention will end. The 30-day window that temporarily grants presidents great powers in the city’s affairs will come to a close, a moment that city officials and many residents have been looking to as a sort of deliverance after four surreal weeks.
But it is unclear how much, if anything, will immediately change.
The end of the 30-day period has no bearing on the thousands of National Guard troops, drawn from the District of Columbia itself and from eight Republican-led states, who have been deployed to Washington. Neither does it directly affect the hundreds of additional federal law enforcement officers — from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies — who have been sent out into the city to patrol. And U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will continue to take people into custody around Washington, as they did long before the emergency was declared.
Congress is marking the last day of the emergency by taking up a range of legislation that would eat away at D.C.’s self-government, including bills that would expand federal oversight, cancel local laws and eliminate some locally elected positions. (Although the district has about 500,000 eligible voters, they do not have congressional representation.)
For now, the specter of ever-greater federal control over the city, even if it has loomed particularly large over the past month, is going nowhere.
“With this administration and this particular crop of individuals in the Congress, you give an inch, they will take a mile,” said Christina Henderson, a member at large of the District of Columbia Council. “This is a group of people that require you to have your head on a swivel at all times.”
The Wednesday night deadline pertains only to presidential authority over local police, as detailed in the 1973 Home Rule Act, and even this authority is not as comprehensive as the White House has claimed.
The Trump administration was never actually able to take over the Metropolitan Police Department, though Mr. Trump and Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general, declared their intention to do so. Days after the announcement, Brian Schwalb, the elected D.C. attorney general, filed a lawsuit arguing that the law didn’t give presidents the authority to take full control of the police department, only the authority to direct the mayor to provide certain police services for a declared federal emergency.
Facing hostile questions from a federal judge, the administration backed down from its broadest claims to power. After talks with the city, the Justice Department issued an order listing the services that the Trump administration was demanding, chiefly involving immigration enforcement.
That is one of the few things that will be different, on paper at least, on Thursday: The local police, whose cooperation with federal immigration enforcement is strictly limited under D.C. law, will no longer be compelled to cooperate with ICE.
But police operations on the ground might not change right away. Days after Mr. Trump’s announcement, the D.C. police chief, Pamela A. Smith, issued an order to her department, outlining the extent to which officers could cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
Tom Lynch, a spokesman for the police department, said that the order currently remains in place, and he declined to comment on what might happen after the deadline.
Phil Mendelson, the chairman of the D.C. Council, said he believed that the degree of police cooperation with ICE would wind down, though not at the stroke of midnight. “I think what we’re going to see is a slow and gradual transition,” he said. “I don’t think there will be a night-and-day separation.”
People who work with local immigrant communities said that the involvement of local police with ICE over the past month had undone years of community work by city officials.
“D.C. has made a lot of great efforts to have a Latino liaison,” said Abel Núñez, the executive director of Carecen, a social services organization for Latino immigrants. Police reassured immigrants that they could safely report domestic abuse or come forward with witness accounts about violent crime, he said. Now, “it’ll take years to rebuild that trust.”
Mr. Núñez said he expected that city leaders, including Mayor Muriel Bowser, would probably not begin repairing that break right away. For her to publicly reassure immigrants in the city, he said, would risk triggering a new round of intervention from the Trump administration.
“She’s measuring what’s best for the overall city from her perspective,” he said. “That means that as immigrants we are left in a very vulnerable situation.”
Indeed, no one in D.C. leadership is breathing a sigh of relief.
Republicans in Congress are set to discuss more than a dozen bills concerning the District of Columbia on Wednesday, some of them seeking to permanently expand the federal government’s already considerable power over the city. Even without new legislation, the ability of the city to run its affairs remains precarious: Earlier this year, House Republicans declined to insert a routine clause pertaining to Washington in a budget resolution, leaving D.C. with a $1.1 billion funding shortfall.
There is also a lingering fear among D.C. officials, usually raised in whispers, that the president could simply decide to declare another emergency at any time, starting a new 30-day window of federal intrusion.
Mayor Bowser has said repeatedly that the city’s vulnerability required her to be strategic in dealing with the administration, a stance that has drawn criticism from residents and other elected officials who are urging a more confrontational stance. Last week, she announced the formation of a “Safe and Beautiful Emergency Operations Center” to help coordinate with the federal law enforcement agencies — not including ICE — that have sent officers to do police work in the city. Two days later, she declined to offer unequivocal support when Mr. Schwalb sued the Trump administration, challenging the deployment of National Guard troops in the city.
“My 100 percent focus is on exiting the emergency,” the mayor said to reporters when asked about the lawsuit. “That’s where all of our energies are.”
Michael Gold contributed reporting.
Campbell Robertson reports for The Times on Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
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