Dozens of Washington, D.C., residents vented their outrage at police officers carrying out a drug arrest amid President Donald Trump’s law enforcement surge in the nation’s capital on Wednesday.
The Associated Press
Along a strip of street stands selling Latin American food and clothing in the Columbia Heights neighbourhood of Washington, vendors can list off the people they have seen taken away by masked federal agents in the past three weeks.
There were two young men working a coconut-water stand. One guy selling fruit. Three who had just left a nearby church.
“They’re grabbing working people who aren’t hurting anyone,” said Wendy Acosta as she sold soccer jerseys one afternoon this week.
Agents have also been spotted cruising the area in black cars, she said, appearing to survey the scene. On one occasion, a group of officers formed up next to the adjacent metro station, only to be confronted by a jeering crowd.
Washington residents march through the Columbia Heights neighborhood in protest of President Donald Trump’s seizure of local police and anti-immigration policies, on Aug. 22.DOMINIC GWINN/Getty Images
“Trump says he’s going to clean up the streets, he’s going to clean up crime, but that’s not what’s happening,” said Cristina Chavarilla.
Since President Donald Trump launched his police and military crackdown in the U.S. capital this month, the intervention has reached into nearly every corner of the city.
National Guard soldiers carrying assault rifles stand as sentinels around the monuments. The Metropolitan Police Department and at least six federal agencies set up evening checkpoints on busy streets and patrol nightlife districts. U.S. Park Police have cleared away homeless encampments. And officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement are arresting suspected undocumented immigrants.
Mr. Trump describes the operation as a thundering success. “It can’t get much better,” he said of the city this week. “There’s no crime.”
Members of the South Carolina National Guard patrol the Amtrak area of Union Station in Washington, on Sunday.Rod Lamkey/The Associated Press
Even Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat who objected to Mr. Trump taking control of city police as part of the clampdown, on Wednesday credited the surge of federal officers with reducing crime.
“There’s more accountability in the system, or at least perceived accountability in the system, that is driving down illegal behaviour,” she said.
Numbers released by her office show reported instances of violent crime down by 45 per cent, including a 38-per-cent drop in homicides, between Aug. 7 and Aug. 26, compared with the same period last year.
Critics, however, argue that the crackdown ranges from ineffectual security theatre to bringing the hammer down on immigrants and homeless people, abrogating Washington’s autonomy while doing nothing to address the underlying causes of crime. Violent crime, they point out, was already at a 30-year low before the troops rolled in.
The Trump administration has deployed federal officers and the National Guard to Washington.Win McNamee/Getty Images
With Mr. Trump vowing to take similar actions in Chicago, New York and Baltimore, the scenes on the streets of Washington could mark the template for a major expansion of martial presidential power into U.S. cities.
Standing near a group of National Guardsmen at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, Gabriel Rock said Mr. Trump’s portrayal of the city as a “death trap” that needed to be brought under control by the military did not accord with his experience. A university student who grew up in the Washington area and has volunteered at homeless shelters, Mr. Rock said he doesn’t feel unsafe here.
To tamp down crime, he said, politicians had to address its root causes, such as poverty. “The way you deal with it isn’t authoritarianism. It’s putting money into community programs,” he said.
His friend Shreyan Ragudaran felt that Mr. Trump was using the guardsmen as political props. “We respect them, they’re great people,” he said of the troops. “You shouldn’t politicize the military.”
A protester confronts members of the National Guard on Aug. 16.Alex Kent/Reuters
Nearby, Richard Bruning, on holiday from Fort Worth, Tex., saw the utility of deploying the soldiers. He said he had “heard a lot of bad things” about Washington crime and hoped the deployment would deter it.
“It’s giving the National Guard something to do other than sitting around in a camp,” he said. “If it gives some sign to the criminals to deviate them from criminal acts, I support it.”
Up and down the Mall, guards stood in groups chatting, strolled back and forth, and indulged passersby asking to pose for photos.
“You feel more secure when you see people who are guarding the nation, guarding the people,” said David Chelli, who was visiting from Bangalore, India after getting his photo taken with the troops in the shadow of the Washington Monument.
Outside Union Station, the city’s central rail hub, a group of protesters kept up a 24-hour demonstration against Mr. Trump. The group, dubbed Flare USA, has been here since May. From the start of the President’s clampdown, some of its members have been fanning out around the city to witness and record police activity.
Protesters demonstrate near Washington’s Union Station on Aug. 16.Alex Kent/Reuters
Joey Jebari, a university philosophy lecturer and one of the protesters, framed Mr. Trump’s intervention as the latest in a series of attacks on Washington. He pointed to mass layoffs of civil servants earlier this year and the President’s approval of a congressional cut to the civic budget this spring.
The city has an unusual legal status, in which its ability to govern itself depends entirely on congressional statute, giving the federal government wide latitude to insert itself.
But Mr. Jebari warned that what Mr. Trump is doing here is just the beginning. “He’s testing out strategies for extending his power grab elsewhere and normalizing the presence of military forces in cities.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a city that votes 90-per-cent Democratic, police actions have often been met with a furious response.
When officers set up a checkpoint near the busy U Street NW bar district one night, a crowd of residents gathered on the sidewalks, chanting “get off our streets.” During another checkpoint near the city’s largest hospital, people held homemade signs warning motorists that there were officers ahead.
At the food-stand strip in Columbia Heights, vendors said business had dropped off for them and for the many restaurants and bars that serve the neighbourhood’s large Latino population. People are simply afraid to leave their houses lest they be stopped by la migra, as ICE is referred to here.
Sitting at her friend’s agua-fresca stand as evening fell, Magda Rodriguez said that, in the 28 years since she moved to the U.S. from El Salvador, she had never before encountered immigration agents in the streets. She has begun carrying documents with her in case she has to prove her legal status.
“In all the years I’ve been here, it’s the first time there’s been this terror.”