Washington DC’s only Home Depot was busy with contractors and customers on Thursday morning – but the Hispanic day laborers who usually gather and wait for work under the parking lot’s sparse trees were nowhere to be found.
Two days earlier, masked federal agents swarmed the area and made several arrests, which were photographed by bystanders and posted on social media. Juwan Brooks, a store employee who witnessed the raid, said the agents grabbed anyone who appeared Hispanic.
“They don’t ask no questions,” Brooks said. People walking across the parking lot, getting out of their cars, or even sleeping in their vehicle – all were grabbed by the agents, leaving behind empty work trucks that were eventually towed away.
“It was cool when Trump was saying it, but to actually see it first hand? I didn’t like it,” Brooks said. The day laborers “are not bad people”, and he wondered what happened to the children of the men that were taken away.
Four days after Trump ordered federal agents and national guard on to the streets of Washington DC to fight a crime wave that city leaders say is not happening, residents of the capital are becoming used to the presence of groups of armed men in their neighborhoods, and the aggressive tactics they use.
Beyond the apparent immigration arrests at Home Depot – which Brooks said was the second raid there he is aware of since Trump took office – federal agents have been spotted setting up roadblocks at busy intersections, and patrolling neighborhoods across the city. Trump, who exercised a never-before-used clause in the law governing the district to take over the Metropolitan police department (MPD) for 30 days, this week said he would seek Congress’s approval to keep it under federal control for the “long term”.
I just feel like it’s too much federal overreach
It’s unclear how much of a difference the deployment has yet made on public safety. Rates of violent crime dropped to 30-year lows last year, but it remains more prevalent in Washington DC than many cities with similar populations. Since Trump made the deployment official on Monday, the city recorded two homicides, bringing its count for the year up to 101.
“I just feel like it’s too much federal overreach. I think it’s unnecessary, and I think our MPD does a great job,” said Kevin Cataldo, a neighborhood commissioner whose district includes the block just north of downtown where the 100th homicide of the year took place on Monday, hours after Trump announced the federal takeover.
The White House says 800 national guard troops will be on the ground in the city, along with hundreds of federal officers from the Drug Enforcement Administration, border patrol, FBI and other agencies. On Thursday afternoon, a half-dozen unarmed troops, who said they had been told not to talk to the press, could be found milling among the tourists visiting the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, an area not known for crime.
“What they are doing right now? It’s just a show of force. I did that in Iraq,” said Kevin Davis, a 21-year army veteran visiting the capital from El Paso, Texas. “When people see the uniform, they act differently.”
More prevalent have been the federal agents who have appeared in neighborhoods across the overwhelmingly Democratic city.
[Residents] were trying to tell them to leave, you know, the people in the street and the neighbors
They began arriving over the weekend, and on Sunday night, a justice department employee was arrested for hurling a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection official, and later charged with felony assault on a federal officer. Recent evenings have seen federal agents and police set up roadblocks and pull drivers over on major roads, as protesters gathered to condemn them.
On Tuesday evening on 14th Street in Columbia Heights, a north-west Washington neighborhood that is home to the city’s largest Hispanic population, police and federal agents, some with their faces covered, began stopping cars, said a local shop manager who declined to be named. Before long, dozens of people emerged to berate them.
“[Residents] were trying to tell them to leave, you know, the people in the street and the neighbors,” he told the Guardian. “They yelled back ‘don’t make the people scared, this is a free country’, ‘why make the community unsafe?’,” the manager said.
The scene repeated a little over a mile south on 14th Street on Wednesday evening, with police and federal agents pulling over cars, and locals heckling them and trying to warn approaching drivers away, according to videos posted on social media.
Owen Simon, an undergraduate government student at Georgetown University, had heard that agents were spotted in the tony neighborhood around campus, and wondered what they were doing there. Muggings happened occasionally in the neighborhood, but Simon said he was less concerned about those than what the agents might do to foreign students – or students who appeared to be foreign.
“No one wants to walk around knowing that anyone could be scooped up out of the street at any moment,” he said. “I don’t think that this move by the Trump administration is a way to crack down on crime. I think it’s about optics.”
As he smoked a cigarette in the Home Deport parking lot, Brooks had a similar concern about Congress Heights, the south-east Washington neighborhood where he lives. Crime there is undoubtedly a concern, but it was teenagers who were behind it, not his working-class neighbors.
“You got other people catching strays off that, too,” he said. “You got working people living in the neighborhood, going to the store, getting picked up because of 16-, 17-year-olds.
“I understand targeting the area, but you can’t really blame the people in the area who are trying to do better,” he added.
Over the weekend, he had seen eight cars full of federal agents driving through his neighborhood like they wanted to be seen, something he had never witnessed the city police do.
“What is this for?” he wondered. “It’s more of an intimidation tactic.”
Joseph Gedeon contributed reporting
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