Washington, DC – The news was met with jeers.
United States President Donald Trump on Monday invoked a “crime emergency” in the US capital, allowing his Department of Justice to take control of Washington, DC’s local law enforcement. He simultaneously announced the Pentagon would deploy US National Guard forces to the city of more than 700,000.
Gathered just blocks away, with the White House looming in the background, protesters erupted in a chorus of “boos”.
The Pentagon later said 800 soldiers were activated on Monday, with 100-200 of them supporting law enforcement.
Trump’s latest move, said Keya Chatterjee, the executive director of Free DC, was not just another salvo against the long marginalised rights of the residents of the city, but a “major escalation”.
“This goes beyond the sort of words people have been using, like ‘unprecedented and ‘unusual,’” said Chatterjee, whose group advocates for DC self-determination.
“This is just authoritarianism,” she told Al Jazeera, over the chants from the crowd.
‘Represent ourselves’
The rights of the hundreds of thousands of residents of Washington, DC have been the subject of debate since it was established by Congress in 1790 with land from Maryland and Virginia.
The district continues to fall under the direct auspices of the federal government, having never been granted statehood. However, it maintains a level of local autonomy per the Home Rule Act of 1973, which allows residents to elect some local officials. Congress still reviews all legislation passed by those elected officials and approves the district’s budget.
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The city’s superlative as the first Black majority city in the US, and its current status as a Black plurality city, has further added a racial dynamic to what advocates have long decried as the systematic disenfranchisement of its residents.
Civil rights leader Reverend Al Sharpton called the move the “ultimate affront to justice and civil rights,” in a statement.
“Donald Trump was inspired to take this disgusting, dangerous, and derogatory action solely out of self interest,” Sharpton said in a statement. “Let’s call the inspiration for this assault on a majority Black city for what it is: another bid to distract his angry, frustrated base over his administration’s handling of the Epstein files.”
In March, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser agreed to rename the Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House, where Monday’s protest was held, amid pressure from Trump and concerns that federal funding could be withheld.
Bowser said Monday that the deployment of the National Guard was “unsettling”, but not without precedent.
“My message to residents is this,” Bowser said. “We know that access to our democracy is tenuous. That is why you have heard me and many Washingtonians before me advocate for full statehood.”
For many gathered on Monday, Trump’s move again underscored how little power they had in directly influencing the policies of the local law enforcement that directly oversees their community.
Amari Jack, a 20-year-old college student, described what he saw as “the first step” in a wider consolidation of power over the city, noting Trump has for years floated the idea of taking more full control of the metropolis surrounding the White House. Such a move would likely require Congress overturning the Home Rule Act.
“I came out today because I was really scared about the potential that DC could lose any autonomy it has,” Jack told Al Jazeera.
“I feel like as DC natives, born and raised, we need to be able to represent ourselves and enrich our communities. We can’t just have a president come in and rule over our home.”
Crime as a pretext?
For his part, in an order declaring the “emergency”, Trump decried what he called the “city government’s failure to maintain public order and safety”, claiming crime rates posed “intolerable risks to the vital Federal functions that take place in the District of Columbia”.
Speaking to reporters from the White House, Trump vowed to “take our capital back”, outlining what he described as “massive enforcement operations targeting known gangs, drug dealers and criminal networks to get them the hell off the street”.
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Trump further claimed he was “getting rid of the slums”, and would clear homeless people from the city, without offering further details of his plans.
Among those pushing back on the characterisation was the District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb, who called the move “unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful.”
“There is no crime emergency in the District of Columbia,” he said.
While DC crime rates are typically higher than the national average, violent crime rates have dropped significantly in recent years, plummeting 35 percent from 2023 to 2024 and another 26 percent this year compared to the same period last year, according to Metropolitan Police data.
Early this year, the Justice Department announced that violent crime in DC had hit a 30-year low.
Groups like the Center for American Progress have attributed the decline to both local law enforcement strategies, as well as “investments in crime prevention and resources such as housing and education and employment supports”.
Twenty-year-old Radha Tanner, like many gathered, saw Trump as using the pretext of crime to enact a wider political mission, one that paints Democrat-dominated cities like DC as “unsafe and riddled with crime”.
Over 90 percent of DC voters supported Trump’s Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 election. Trump, in turn, won about 6.5 percent of the vote.
Tanner saw Monday’s moves as in line with Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, California to aid in immigration crackdowns and the protests they spurred.
“He’s doing this to make an example out of a city full of Democrats that is vulnerable because we don’t have representation,” Tanner said.
‘Best place for us to resist’
Maurice Carney, 60, saw a similar goal in Trump’s actions, arguing that long-term investment, not a short-term commandeering of local law enforcement or the deployment of the National Guard, would actually show a real commitment to addressing crime.
“When you see this increase in militarisation, whether it’s in DC or on the African continent or anywhere else in the world, you always see an increase in violence, either from resistance or from creating an environment that’s unstable,” said Carney, who works with a DC-based group that advocates for citizens of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“Like it or not, DC is seen as the capital of the empire, the capital of the world,” Carney told Al Jazeera. “So if Trump wants to show he’s this ‘law and order’ guy, DC is the best place for him to do that.”
“It’s also the best place for us to resist,” he said, “for us to stand up and let the rest of the world know that even right in the heart of the empire, the people – local residents of DC – resisted.”