Donald Trump, following a pattern of inventing false crises to justify his use of extraordinary executive power, declared a “public safety emergency” in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 11, deploying 800 National Guard troops to support hundreds of federal law enforcement officers whom he had deployed just days earlier. Trump said he was sending in the National Guard and taking control of the city’s police department to crack down on crime and homelessness which he said was necessary to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, squalor and worse.” Trump mentioned that he was responding to news that a former DOGE employee had recently been beaten in a failed unarmed carjacking attempt.
Responding to the unprecedented order, Washington, D.C.’s Mayor Muriel Bowser rejected the president’s claim of a dangerous crime wave, declaring that while there had been a spike in crime during the COVID pandemic, violent crime in the city had now declined to a 30-year low.
As he announced his emergency declaration in Washington, D.C., Trump threatened to deploy the military to other major U.S. cities, including New York City, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Oakland, California. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-founder and executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. Here she discusses her group’s response to Trump’s militarized takeover of Washington, D.C., and growing concern that this is another dress rehearsal (along with Los Angeles) for the future deployment of U.S. troops to majority-minority cities across the nation and the possible invocation of the Insurrection Act and suspension of constitutional rights in advance of the 2026 mid-term elections.
MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: Well, we have a combination of actions that are happening from Trump’s authoritarian effort to impose basically what we view as a prototype police state in Washington, D.C. And, I think it’s important to recognize it as that because not only is it an effort to basically establish an occupation force in the District of Columbia, but it’s a model effort, an effort that he openly acknowledged he is planning to deploy on cities across the United States and urban environments. And it’s really an effort to normalize the militarization of our cities in the United States so that we’re seeing National Guards troops.
But the multi-pronged effort is he both called out the National Guard — which under sort of a quirk of the law and under the D.C. Home Rule Act Section 740 in most places, in most actual states, because we are still a colony. We don’t have autonomy; we don’t have statehood.
The president acts as the governor, so the president actually can call out the National Guard. But then in addition to calling out the National Guard under Section 740 of the Home Rule Act, what he did was move to federalize the district’s police. So he has what is a Title 32 deployment of the National Guard, then under Section 740 attempting, federalizing, trying to put the federal police under the direction of the federal government.
But what he also did is several days before those two executive orders issued last week, days before he started sending hundreds of federal law enforcement officers into the streets of the District of Columbia to carry out law enforcement activities on streets that they’re utterly unfamiliar with.
So you have FBI agents, you have a growing saturation of Homeland Security agents. So I say that to sort of set the stage for now, what is it that we’re seeing here and night after night? And so we have these sort of roving mobs of federal law enforcement that are setting up checkpoints, that are just walking around and assaulting and tackling food delivery drivers; that are engaging in just constant racial profiling; that are harassing the residents of the district; that are grabbing people and detaining them and taking them into detention for deportation — in addition to just the show of armored cars and military personnel in uniform all over the place, primarily in major downtown like National Mall and Union Station areas.
SCOTT HARRIS: Donald Trump is quite clear that he’s threatening military occupations of other majority-minority cities across the U.S. There is a prohibition on the U.S. military being deployed to cities to engage in police work or law enforcements. It’s called the Posse Comitatus Act. Maybe you can talk to us a little bit about what’s the legal battle ahead to stop what’s going on that’s clearly unconstitutional.
MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: Well, that’s right. The Posse Comitatus Act does stop military deployment. But these are the workarounds that the Trump administration is hoping to get at — the District of Columbia, of course, being the first measure for them because the president does have the right to call out the National Guard. But in other states — and this is like what happened in California — was the issue of when can the federal government overstep the governor and basically federalize the National Guard.
So there’s a distinction between something that’s called a Title 32 deployment or when states cooperatively send their guards to other states. And then a Title 10 deployment, which is different federalization circumstance. So there are standards that have to be met in order to do that. And there is no doubt, I mean there’s litigation in California right now on this, but there is no doubt that there will be a serious fight over any effort to be sending militarized troops into other states.
That’s also why we think the district becomes very important as an initial ground, because again, it is trying to get all of us, not just in the district, but around the country, to sort of get used to this idea — used to this idea that we would just have these basically occupying forces on our corners, that we would be seeing people in camouflage and fatigues and military gear as a normal part of our day-to-day life walking around, or just the incredible chilling impact that this has on populations who are being absolutely terrorized by the military deployment, as well as the Homeland Security and additional federal agencies just tackling, grabbing, snatching people, profiling people. It’s brutal. And it’s appalling.
For more information, visit The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund at justiceonline.org.
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