As President Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C., continues, some Democrats are calling out his deployment of troops in a supposed effort to thwart urban crime — and his threats to do the same thing in many other cities — as racist.
“This amounts to racial profiling,” said Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, during a press call hosted by the Not Above the Law coalititon.
“You can’t say you’re for public safety and care only about some people and some crimes,” Wiley continued. “That’s what’s happening here. That’s what they’re promising to roll out to other cities.”
The Washington-based lawyer’s comments come as Trump’s military takeover of the nation’s capital nears its 30-day limit, and as he renews his threats to take similar action in Chicago. Over the last month, the federal government has effectively seized control of local law enforcement in Washington. It has deployed 800 National Guard troops to patrol neighborhoods and established checkpoints to randomly stop and interrogate motorists, often over perceived violations of immigration law. Trump’s administration has also encouraged governors of red states hundreds of miles away to lend their troops to assist in his purported crackdown on crime in the capital city.
“You can’t say you’re for public safety and care only about some people and some crimes. That’s what’s happening here. That’s what they’re promising to roll out to other cities.”
But if Trump had a true interest in cracking down on crime, said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., on the press call, he would support efforts to enact gun control legislation or fund grants for law enforcement and victim service programs, including the more than $800 million the Justice Department terminated earlier this year.
“Restore those $800 million, and while you’re at it, restore the billion dollars in locally raised revenue that the District of Columbia was denied by MAGA Republicans in Congress,” Raskin said Tuesday. “There’s a lot that can be done.”
The police checkpoints established by Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department under federal supervision, Wiley added, demonstrate the racial motivations behind the entire crackdown.
“We are seeing Black and immigrant communities targeted and identified in particular. We know that’s going to continue,” she said. “This is an administration that has already signed an executive order that said, ‘Unleash the police.’ This is not one that is looking to protect rights or protect residents.”
Wiley also evoked the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the killing of Breonna Taylor by police, referencing the Trump administration’s decision to cancel consent decrees with police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville — the cities where those killings occurred — earlier this year.
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“Let us not forget: This is the administration that told the Minneapolis Police Department, where we so viciously saw more than nine minutes of the lifeblood literally being squeezed out of George Floyd, and [the police department in] Louisville, Kentucky, where Breonna Taylor couldn’t even sleep safely in her own bed, [that] we don’t even want agreements with local law enforcement where they agree to improve training, improve transparency, to be accountable and to police better so that people’s rights are not being violated,” Wiley said.
Trump has threatened to use extraordinary presidential powers to send National Guard troops to Chicago, Baltimore and several other cities he claims are overrun with crime. All the cities Trump has singled out, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott observed in a press call last month, are governed by Black mayors and boast large Black and brown populations. Those cities, as Salon has previously reported, have also all seen significant decreases in homicide rates in recent years.
Scott, a Democrat, similarly called out the “racial undertones” of Trump’s derisive descriptions of Black-led cities as being so crime-ridden and so incompetently managed that military intervention is required.
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In August, Raskin, along with Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., introduced a joint resolution to terminate the state of emergency that Trump declared, allowing him to take control of Washington’s MPD. Such a resolution would restore power over local law enforcement to elected Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Raskin said that the law Trump evoked to take control of Washington would have been better employed during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, an emergency where the federal government, he added, actually had the legal authority to intervene.
“That provision says that the president can direct the mayor to make the Metropolitan Police Department available to meet a particular federal crisis, a particular federal function,” Raskin said. “A good example of that might be a violent insurrection against the Congress of the United States. … That was something, of course, that Donald Trump did not do during the violent insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, nor did he mobilize the National Guard, which was under his exclusive, unilateral control.”
On Tuesday, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that Trump illegally deployed the National Guard in that city earlier this summer to quell protests against the government’s mass deportation of immigrants. The judge found that the president had violated a statute that bars members of the military from enforcing civilian laws, although the administration is sure to appeal this ruling.
