DC is under military occupation. This is not hyperbole.
Trump mobilized 800 National Guard troops on Aug. 11 to patrol DC’s streets. Now six Republican-led states, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, West Virginia, South Carolina, and Ohio are sending hundreds more, potentially doubling that number. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered an emergency commissioner to replace DC’s police chief, a move DC has blocked in court, and while Trump can legally sustain this intervention for only 30 days, the President is asking Congress to make the takeover indefinite. Given DC’s small size, this deployment of the National Guard is nearly twice as dense as that of Los Angeles earlier this year.
What does this look like on the ground?
ID Checkpoints on the streets, M-ATV infantry mobility vehicles rolling by Union Station, heavy patrolling of majority Black and brown neighborhoods by masked men, racial profiling and harassment of people who are working and going about their business. ICE arrests have spiked.
Disappointingly, the immediate reaction of the media and DC policymakers was to respond with logic—evidenced-based interventions and not criminalization are needed to improve the situation of unhoused people in the District, DC crime rates are actually at a 30-year low—according to Mayor Muriel Bowser—and Trump is exaggerating the numbers. DC’s Police Union even welcomed the “support” with the caveat that federal law enforcement would have to be sensitive to the local context.
To see this debate play out is like living in an alternate reality. Trump doesn’t actually care about ending homelessness, or the safety of DC residents, and logic (forget evidence-based policymaking) left the building a long time ago. To engage with the false arguments surrounding the takeover is to miss the authoritarian power grab happening before our eyes. This occupation is not about crime nor homelessness, it’s a testing ground to crack down on groups considered to be “undesirable” to a white supremacist America and a step toward large-scale militarization. We must treat Trump’s actions as part of what we know his project to be, not what he says, because while officials argue over crime statistics, federal forces continue to descend on the city with very little practical solidarity from Democrats and other national leaders.
A Testing Ground for Control
Why is this really happening in DC? Many Americans don’t know that DC’s roughly 700,000 residents, majority non-White, don’t have voting representation in Congress. DC was historically a federal district under direct Congressional jurisdiction. The city won “home rule,” that is, the right to have an elected local government, in 1973, but Congress maintains the power to overturn local laws. DC residents have fought for decades to get statehood—key to ending our systemic disenfranchisement. In DC, our license plates say, “taxation without representation.”
DC’s unique status makes it an easier target for this kind of federal takeover, but it also produces conditions for the kind of mass social crackdown that Trump is trying to justify.
In March, Congress passed a resolution mandating a federal spending freeze. While such freezes usually carve out an exemption for DC’s budget, which has to be approved by Congress, such an exemption was absent from the bill, effectively cutting the city’s budget by $1.1 billion and forcing the city to make cuts to services and important programs that protect domestic workers, renters, low-income families, and other populations particularly vulnerable to Trump’s racist and xenophobic policies. Additionally, DC bore the brunt of DOGE’s mass firings, losing an estimated 40,000 federal jobs and thus a great deal of fiscal income (estimated at another $1 billion loss over the next 3 years). National policies also have devastating local impacts. According to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed on July 4th transfers the burden of SNAP food benefits from the federal government to the city, costing DC up to an additional $50 million. It also imposes bureaucratic barriers to Medicaid, including work requirements,that threaten health care access for up to 114,000 DC residents. The city is poised to face significant economic hardship, and Mayor Muriel Bowser’s traditional “trickle down” approach to growth will likely leave most working DC families behind. In short, the government is producing more poverty just as it intensifies its criminalization of the poor.
A Ploy for Privatization?
Occupation is seldomly just about military control; it often lays the groundwork for privatization and corporate profiteering. Trump has become a vocal supporter of “freedom” cities– a project with precedent in Honduras after a military coup d’etat in 2009 that gives tech and venture capitalists control over a special jurisdiction within the country. In Honduras, Honduras Prospera Inc., a company registered in Delaware, founded the first private city and created its own government and regulations—a takeover that Hondurans have resisted. The private cities, technically Economic Development and Employment Zones (ZEDEs), have been declared unconstitutional in Honduras, but Próspera has used an international investment tribunal to demand up to $10.7 billion from the Honduran government. The backers of the Próspera private city and a network of libertarian tech capitalists including Palantir’s Peter Thiel and other moguls have secured support from the Trump administration to create “Freedom Cities” in the U.S.—a lesser-known promise of Trump’s electoral campaign. Some in the network openly called for the Presidio Park in San Francisco to be converted to a “Freedom City,” just as Trump signed an executive order in February to eliminate the Presidio Trust responsible for protecting the park. Another private city group, Praxis, claimed to be “revitalizing Western civilization” by seeking to form a private nation in Greenland, just as Trump’s government declared its intention to annex the island.
In Honduras, it was precisely crime rates and so-called failed government that were used as justification for private control. While Trump and DHS’s campaign to control US cities is about consolidating authoritarian power, we should also be vigilant of potential corporate takeovers like these.
The theater of control and actual political violence are interconnected phenomena. DC is being used as a testing ground not just for authoritarianism but for racist suppression of a historically Black and diverse city. But DC is a city full of vibrant and strong people. Those of us who are from and live in the district love it with all our hearts. As Washingtonians fight to keep our democratic rights, we need the active support of people across the U.S. who can pressure their Congressional representatives. Unfortunately, what happens in DC will set a precedent for the rest of the country.
