The National Guard started ramping up its presence in Washington on Thursday, deploying troops to the National Mall and Metro stations as President Trump’s takeover of city crime-fighting begins to take shape.
Overnight, the first signs of on-the-ground resistance to federal forces popped up in response to a checkpoint that halted traffic on one of the city’s main streets.
The White House said more than 1,600 personnel were involved in operations across the city on Wednesday, making 45 arrests, mostly of immigrants who lacked permanent legal status.
While the Guard had a relatively small footprint in the city earlier this week, by Thursday, all of the roughly 800 Army and Air National Guard troops Trump ordered to the streets had mobilized for duty, the Pentagon confirmed.
“They will remain until law and order has been restored in the district as determined by the president, standing as the gatekeepers of our great nation’s capital,” Department of Defense press secretary Kingsley Wilson told reporters at the Pentagon.
She added that the guard members will assist the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and federal law enforcement officers with “community safety patrols,” protecting monuments, federal facilities and traffic control posts, and “area beautification.”
“It’s a deterrent. It makes people feel safe,” Kingsley said.
The number of guard members have steadily increased since Monday evening, when they were first spotted along the National Mall. On Thursday, they were positioned around the National Mall and Metro stops such as Union Station, where tourists milled about and the occasional camera crew stopped to capture footage of the troops and their vehicles.
At 7th Avenue NW and Madison Drive NW, between the long stretches of grass that separate the Washington Monument from the Capitol Building, a lone military vehicle was spotted idling on the street with two service members inside. Tourists stopped to take pictures of the vehicle with the monuments in the background.
And at Union Station, four Humvees were parked outside the building on the grass, with guard member standing in the nearly 90-degree heat as numerous camera crews captured their largely quiet presence.
National Guard Bureau spokesperson Maj. Micah Maxwell said the guard members were part of two teams sent to the National Mall and nearby Metro stations for a continuous presence of 24 hours, with plans to increase locations in the days ahead.
“It will be a slow increase, so I wouldn’t expect to see a big increase of soldiers and airmen across the city,” he told The Hill.
Part of the National Guard’s mission is to support law enforcement — which has also been expanding its presence across the district — though they will not be armed and cannot make arrests.
The troops are allowed to detain people temporarily in certain circumstances until federal agents arrive, much like the guard members deployed in Los Angeles in June to help quell protests over immigration raids.
“They will not be arresting people,” Wilson said. “They may temporarily limit the movement of an individual who has entered a restricted or secured area without permission.”
“The idea is that [the Guard] allows the lead federal agencies then to take their officer personnel to some of the other high crime areas to start addressing that crime,” Maxwell said.
Asked why the Guard hasn’t been positioned in areas of higher crime rates, he said the lead law enforcement agency “has not asked us for that.”
A mix of federal officers set up a vehicle checkpoint on 14th Street NW corridor in downtown D.C. on Wednesday night, drawing some of the first public protests since Trump’s announcement on Monday.
A group of protestors shouted out or held up signs with phrases such as “Go home, fascists” and “Get off our streets,” The Associated Press reported. The group also encouraged drivers to take other routes to avoid the officers, according to the news wire.
The National Guard was not involved in the checkpoint.
Social media has also been abuzz with smaller acts of protest.
Filmmaker Ford Fischer posted a video of a man screaming at National Guard members in Humvees driving away from Union Station on Thursday, telling them to resist unlawful orders.
Another man was charged with a felony after being accused of throwing a sandwich at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent Sunday. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the man, Sean Dunn, 37, was a Department of Justice employee — until being fired this week.
Despite the scattered signs of pushback, both city leaders and Democrats in Congress face a tricky balance of pushing back on what they see as Trump’s overreach without being seen as defending the status quo on crime.
While violent crime in Washington is at a 30-year low, the majority of residents still see crime as a big problem in the city. A Washington Post poll last year found that 65 percent of Washingtonians said crime in D.C. is an “extremely serious” or a “very serious problem.”
Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) — who left the city Thursday for a family commitment and plans to return Friday, according to her office — was initially cautious with her response to Trump’s moves.
“The fact that we have more law enforcement and presence in neighborhoods, that may be positive,” she said earlier in the week.
Her tone has since shifted. During a virtual town hall on Tuesday, she said D.C. residents need to “jump in” to “protect our city and to protect our autonomy” and “make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push.”
Trump has already said he intends to extend the federal takeover of D.C. police, setting up a fight in Congress, which must authorize an extension beyond 30 days.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday declared Democrats will not go along with the expected request.
“No f‑‑‑ing way,” Schumer said in an interview. “We’ll fight him tooth and nail. … He needs to get Congress to approve it, and not only are we not going to approve it, but there are some Republicans who don’t like either.”
Still, the vote could put vulnerable Democrats in an awkward spot on crime, an issue that has long been a bugaboo for the party.
Trump has also teased an expansion of his federal interventions in major U.S. cities, particularly those governed by Black Democrats, including Chicago, Oakland, New York City and Baltimore.
“I think it’s very notable that each and every one of the cities called out by the president has a Black mayor, and most of those cities are seeing historic lows in violent crime,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott told CNN. “The president could learn from us instead of throwing things at us.”
The Trump administration is also looking at plans to set up a 600-person National Guard “quick reaction force” to quickly deploy to U.S. cities to quell protests or other unrest, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
The program could be created and funded at the earliest in fiscal 2027 if using the Pentagon’s annual budgetary process, with an open question as to whether it could begin sooner through other means of funding.
It’s not known how much the D.C. National Guard deployment will cost, with Wilson saying there will likely not be an estimate until the mission is over.
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