As the federal occupation of D.C. nears the 30-day mark, District residents of various racial and socioeconomic backgrounds are not only standing up against the influx of federal agents, but also criticizing what’s been described as D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s blatant cooperation with the Trump administration.
For a District educator who requested anonymity, this particular moment creates an opportunity for more privileged dissidents to fully understand the overpolicing that occurs in the District’s majority-Black, low-income neighborhoods.
“They’ve never felt this before, but it’s not as much of a shock, unfortunately, for us,” the educator told The Informer. “But I’m hoping that with this, people will now have some empathy because they feel what we have always been feeling, and hopefully that will make them galvanize more.”
On Saturday, the Ward 8-based educator stumbled upon what eventually morphed into the We Are All D.C. national march. As hundreds of District residents, grassroots activists, union organizers, and clergypeople converged upon Malcolm X Park in Northwest that morning, the educator held up a sign, spoke to other D.C. residents and listened as activists who touched down from other U.S. cities stood alongside local movement workers.
Since the beginning of the school year, this Ward 8-based educator has counted among those posted at the Metro station near her place of work. She told The Informer that she’s doing so with students’ safety in mind, especially as Black people in communities east of the Anacostia River continue to be targets of local and federal forces conducting checkpoints and jumpouts.
“I’ve seen them in the neighborhoods…harassing students,” the educator told The Informer. “So we have had a concerted effort to make sure we are out with our children to make sure they’re safe. They’re just trying to figure out how to keep themselves safe.”
This educator said that, for her youth, there’s nothing new about this scenario.
“The unfortunate reality of the kids I work with is that they’re used to significant police presence in their lives,” she said. “I think that is what the Trump administration is trying to get all of us used to having significant oversight from the government.”
The ‘We Are All DC’ March: A Response to Trump and Bowser
In the early afternoon on Saturday, multitudes of protesters made their way down 16th Street NW starting from Euclid Street and ending at Freedom Plaza. By the time the march ended, organizers counted more than 10,000 people occupying a stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue located near the John A. Wilson Building and the White House.
This event, two weeks in the making, came together through the combined efforts of the Free DC movement, along with Unite Here Local 25, SEIU, United We Dream, Coalition of Concerned Clergy, Metropolitan Washington Council AFL-CIO, Congregation Action Network, CASA, and Washington Interfaith Network. It also took place just days after members of the Free DC movement joined D.C. Council members Robert White (D-At large), Brianne Nadeau (D-Ward 1), Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4), Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5) and Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) outside of the U.S. Capitol in their endeavor to drum up congressional opposition to the federal surge.
On Saturday afternoon, those who took to the mic at Freedom Plaza included: Nee Nee Taylor of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, attorney-activist Preston Mitchum, D.C. Councilmember Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4), former D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, and the Rev. Mark Thompson. As Free DC co-founder Alex Dodds pointed out, the thousands who came out in support of this cause represent a wide spectrum of political viewpoints that have recently coalesced around a unifying issue.
“In local D.C. politics, [there are] a lot of the disagreements between grassroots advocates and the business community, but what’s happening right now is very bad for business,” Dodds told The Informer. “And so groups that are conventionally on different sides of issues in local politics, all recognize that what’s happening right now is bad for all of us.”
As Trump explores the military occupation of other major U.S. cities, Dodds credits Free DC’s collaboration with activists from those jurisdictions — including Chicago and Los Angeles — as a major asset.
“We’re just seeing a lot of the strategies that D.C. has developed over the last three weeks,” she said. “Strategies that we never knew that we would need to create.”
Since President Donald J. Trump’s evocation of Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act, District businesses have reported declining profits amid fears about ICE raids. Meanwhile, Dodds and her Free DC comrades have continued organizing in affected communities, encouraging D.C. residents to record law enforcement officials’ interactions with youth, and that of ICE agents with migrants.
Dodds said that as more people take to social media, ICE agents have been less brazen, but just as insidious, as they navigate portions of the District with a sizable immigrant population.
“ICE is no longer walking around the neighborhoods,” Dodds said. “They’re now doing jump outs because they have encountered so much community resistance that if they start walking around the neighborhoods, people give them such a hard time that they eventually realize that they don’t want to do that anymore.”
Trump’s order, in which Bowser and D.C. public safety officials report to the Office of the U.S. Attorney General, expires on Sept. 10, though there’s been some anticipation of Trump extending the federalization period. In response to the National Guard deployment, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb recently filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, while congressional Republicans attempt to advance bills dismantling the D.C. government.
During the latter part of August, Bowser credited the federal surge with a decrease in crime, though she criticized ICE agents’ use of masks and acknowledged that relations between residents and law enforcement have soured. Last week, she issued a mayoral order establishing the Safe and Beautiful Emergency Operations Center, through which the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice will address requests for services from federal law enforcement partners and extend pay benefits to the D.C. National Guard through Nov. 30.
Key provisions of the mayoral order mandate federal agents’ adherence to community policing protocol, such as not wearing masks, the clear identification of agencies, and the provision of identification when engaging members of the public and conducting arrests. The mayoral order also designates the D.C. National Guard as the primary entity for “mission-driven activities.”
“It’s very important that you understand that the framework that I laid out in the mayor’s order is a pathway out,” Bowser said on Sept. 3. “We have to be very clear to members of Congress that this is how we will be able to request or receive additional resources, management to the most strategic benefit for D.C. residents and public safety.”
At this critical juncture, Dodd said that Bowser’s cooperation with the Trump administration, even if seemingly done on her terms, still equates to acquiesce to a monster without a conscience. Even worse, she said, it counters the good-faith efforts made on the ground to counter Trump’s intrusion on the District’s home rule.
“If we normalize what is happening, they will do it to us more,” Dodds told The Informer. “That’s why there’s so much concern about the remarks that the mayor has made. The people who are doing this to us get encouraged when they hear that type of rhetoric, so it is super important that our leaders say [that] we don’t want this.”
Middle-Class Community Members Express Solidarity with the Marginalized
Brian Nelson, a Northwest resident who’s expressing solidarity with Black and migrant D.C. residents, said he wants to see Bowser take on more of an aggressive tone toward the Trump administration.
“We’re well past the point where that cooperation has yielded anything,” Nelson told The Informer. “I think she’s really acquiescing to them far too much now, and I think she needs to stop and just kind of put her foot down and sort of start to resist.”
On Saturday, Nelson stood in the sweltering heat, sign in hand, as U.S. Park Police officers gathered in a circle and the crowds at Malcolm X Park grew exponentially. He said his decision to protest the federal surge stemmed from what he described as authorities’ detainment of residents who’ve documented law enforcement community engagement from the sidelines.
“There was a citizen in our neighborhood who was recording them and may have been very vocal towards them, but that’s certainly his right to be vocal and film them,” Nelson said. “He’s just a neighbor who’s expressing his opinion publicly, and other people who were recording him getting arrested were also being threatened with arrest. That shouldn’t stand.”
Nelson, who lives in Petworth, questioned the notion that the D.C. government needs assistance in tackling crime, especially with crime, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, trending at a 30-year low.
“There’s things the city could be doing better in a lot of ways,” Nelson said. “I don’t necessarily think they’re all with policing. They may be with city services, improvements for job availability, for housing and all those issues for a lot of people that I think is driving some of the crime.”
Anything else, like what the Trump administration is facilitating, is akin to tyranny, Nelson said.
“They’re using it as an excuse, not only to snatch up people who are just well within their legal rights to film and have an opinion about what’s going on,” Nelson told The Informer. “But they’re also using it as this mask and cover to gather up migrants here in the city to try and deport them because that’s their agenda, and it’s, frankly, completely wrongheaded.”
Well before Trump federalized the D.C. police force, District residents like Thomas Blanton have been working with local leaders to quell crime in their neighborhoods.
Blanton told The Informer that he and his neighbors in the Northeast neighborhood of Lamond-Riggs recently saw the fruits of their labor with the disappearance of an open-air drug market on New Hampshire Avenue and Eastern Avenue.
“We had been working on police patrols, community meetings and our regular Lamond-Riggs Civic Association meetings,” Blanton said. “All of us had been working on getting rid of this thing. And it happened.”
That’s why Blanton said he can’t fathom any situation where the Trump administration directly tackles crime in the District.
“People want home rule and [for laws to] be determined by the local officials that we elected,” Blanton told The Informer. “ If Trump wants to do anything, give us money so we can have the police force and the services that we need to go to our schools, to go to our youth, to get people jobs, to get people out. If he wants to do something, help us have a decent budget.”
Blanton, a longtime District resident with union organizing roots, attended the We Are All DC march with the Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice, an advocacy movement centered on the creation of equitable public policy. He commended the diverse array of organizations present at the march, telling The Informer that each group — including union organizers, immigrants, and racial justice organizations — represent constituencies that can change the tide of the second Trump presidency.
“We can organize [because] we have a really good population of people in the District that are willing to do the right thing,” Blanton said. “And it is finding the right issue that brings people out. The next D.C. election is in two years in Congress. We have a chance to build momentum for D.C. home rule through this struggle.”
Rose Polanco, a Ward 1 resident, expressed similar thoughts as she empathized with Bowser, who she said is stuck between a rock and a hard place. “I know that her hands are tied,” Polanco told The Informer. “I know she’s stuck in a sticky situation, but the only solution to this is giving D.C. statehood.”
For Polanco, achieving statehood, and reversing the damage of the second Trump administration, requires that people in D.C. and across the U.S. unequivocally stand up for the rule of law. She said she saw a glimpse of that on Saturday standing along 16th Street near U Street as multitudes of protesters walked downtown with signs, banners and loudspeakers in hand.
“I’m hopeful that a lot of the things that this administration has destroyed can be put back together,” Polanco said. “ It’s going to take a while, but I think there’s going to be a blue wave coming. And I think the work starts now. And I’m starting to see, you know, people working hard and uniting together because I think people are seeing just how dangerous this administration is.”