President Donald Trump’s takeover of law enforcement in Washington, D.C. — alongside similar actions in and incendiary comments about other Black-led cities across the country — are racist, suggested Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott.
“We have to be reminded again: every city that he called out had a Black mayor. We’re talking about Black-led cities. They’re also Democrat-led cities,” Scott, who was himself a subject of right-wing politicians’ “DEI hire” attacks last year, said during a Thursday press call. “The amount of Black people there — we cannot overstate the racial undertones here.”
Scott’s criticism of the president’s siege of law enforcement in the nation’s capital as a “disgrace and a distraction” followed Trump’s takeover of Washington earlier this week. That move marked the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to quash dissent, in part over his immigration crackdown, in the country’s biggest cities. His placement of Washington in a “quasi-military occupation,” the speakers, including legal experts, argued, advances an authoritarian agenda that threatens Americans’ rights and freedoms.
“This illegal invocation to deploy the National Guard and to act under Section 470 of the Home Rules statute … is simply the latest in a pattern of assaults on the rule of law that have led more than 200 courts to enjoin his actions,” said Norm Eisen, ethics expert and Democracy Defenders Fund executive director. “What he’s doing in D.C. is no different.”
On Monday, Trump announced that he would be taking control of the police in Washington and deploying some 800 members of the National Guard to the city for a month to combat what he called its “out of control” crime. He also called out New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Oakland as “very bad,” signaling he may attempt to extend such deployments to other Democratic cities.
Notably, the homicide rates in each city, especially Baltimore, have seen significant decreases in recent years. Baltimore recorded a 22.7% decrease in homicides in the first six months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, marking a 50-year low in homicides recorded through June, according to a release from Scott’s office. Violent crime in Washington also reached a 30-year low in 2024, according to a Justice Department release.
The president’s actions come on the heels of his deployment of the national guard in Los Angeles earlier this summer after residents protested Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids happening in their neighborhoods. They also follow other actions by the administration to challenge his opponents, including executive actions targeting law firms that had challenged his interests, lawsuits against media organizations and defiance of court orders.
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“If this isn’t concerted, if this isn’t part of a game plan, and if this isn’t as scary as anything that’s happened in our years, I don’t know what is,” said trial lawyer Abbe Lowell, who argued that the Trump administration has attacked or tried to dismantle “every institution that we rely on for the rule of law” in just six months.
While Trump has suggested he would attempt to employ a similar model in other cities, Lowell and Eisen said that he would not have the legal authority to use such force elsewhere, given that Washington has a specific legal framework that provides him with power over it. Trump’s current approach also isn’t legal, they said.
“If what you’re seeing in D.C. is illegal, how much more so this unpredicated, unfounded assertion of emergency and utilization of the military for domestic law enforcement would be in other cities,” Eisen said.
Still, he added, the president’s current course doesn’t bode well for the future.
“We know when people want to say they’re going to be a dictator on day one, they never voluntarily give up that aspiration on day two,” Eisen said. “That’s what you are seeing in the streets of the District of Columbia now.”
