By Andrew Goudsward and Julia Harte
WASHINGTON -A steady stream of uniformed soldiers arrived at the National Guard headquarters in Washington on Tuesday morning, a day after President Donald Trump took the extraordinary step of deploying a force of 800 troops to fight crime in the nation’s capital.
The deployment has drawn the scorn of Democrats who describe the move as political theater and raised questions about where National Guard troops might be sent next.
With Trump threatening to replicate the deployment in other big cities, Democrats pointed out that violent crime in Washington has dropped to historic lows in the past two years.
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser sought to put positive spin on the deployment on Tuesday, saying she wanted to use it to drive down crime, despite earlier calling the move “unsettling and unprecedented.”
She said the National Guard would not have the power to make arrests. Troops will carry no weapons but will have their standard issue firearms, usually rifles, close at hand, an official said. In addition to the National Guard, Trump will send about 500 federal law enforcement agents to supplement the city’s police force during the 30-day emergency deployment.
“We have more police and we want to make sure we use them,” Bowser told reporters on Tuesday.
Earlier Bowser met with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said on X that the exchange was productive.
Invoking emergency powers, Trump has also given Bondi control of the D.C. Metropolitan Police as part of his campaign to rid the city of “violent criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people” – a portrayal mocked by Democrats as distorted and exaggerated.
“We agreed that there is nothing more important than keeping residents and tourists in Washington, D.C., safe from deadly crime,” Bondi said.
In the District of Columbia, violent crime has rapidly declined since a spike in 2023 and is now at historically low levels, data shows.
“Making D.C. the test case for federalizing local policing —by deploying the National Guard and seizing control of our police force — is political theater and a blatantly phony justification for abuse of emergency powers,” said Monica Hopkins, executive director of the ACLU’s D.C. office.
But Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Trump, said crime statistics in Democratic-led cities were fabricated, without providing evidence.
“The real rates of crime, chaos & dysfunction are orders of magnitude higher,” he wrote on X on Tuesday. “Everyone who lives in these areas knows this.”
BREAK WITH NORMS
Deploying the National Guard to other cities would mark a further break with political norms from an administration that has been assertive about deploying presidential power, and critics say the move may not be legal.
In Washington, the D.C. National Guard reports directly to the president, enabling Trump to bypass the city’s elected leaders. In the states, by contrast, the National Guard serves as a militia that answers to the governor, except when called into federal service.
Troops are rarely deployed to police U.S. civilians. Trump’s decision to take control of California’s National Guard in June in response to immigration protests was the first time since the 1992 Rodney King riots that National Guard members were deployed in response to unrest on U.S. soil. Other deployments came in response to disasters or to bolster border security.
The California deployment was also the first time since the Civil Rights era that a state’s National Guard was federalized without the consent of a state’s governor.
After California sued, a trial is underway to determine whether Trump’s use of the troops to bolster immigration raids and other police operations is lawful.
A ruling against Trump by the federal judge in California would set a strong legal precedent, but may not bind the president, who said on Monday he might take similar action in other major U.S. cities with Democratic leadership.
During Trump’s election campaign he singled out majority Democratic cities such as Baltimore, Chicago and Washington – all cities with large Black populations – when he spoke about rampant crime in urban areas.
Chicago, which Trump mentioned on Monday, has long been beset by violent crime, but it was down significantly in the first half of the year.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a statement on Monday that Trump was spreading misinformation about crime, saying homicides dropped 30% in the past two years and shootings were down 40% in the past year alone.
“If President Trump wants to help make Chicago safer, he can start by releasing the funds for anti-violence programs that have been critical to our work to drive down crime and violence,” Johnson said.”
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward and Jasper Ward in Washington; Idrees Ali in Toronto; Dietrich Knauth and Julia Harte in New York; Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico; and Brendan O’Brien in Chicago. Writing by Donna Bryson; Editing by Frank McGurty and Deepa Babington)
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