Despite President Donald Trump declaring a “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital in mid August– deploying the National Guard and other federal offices– new statistics reveal that many of the people arrested since that time were not violent criminals.
Nearly 40% of the more than 3,500 arrests made in D.C. since the Aug. 11 start of the 30-day federal officers surge were immigration related, according to federal data published by CBS News.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement alone accounted for roughly 1,400 of those arrests, most of them administrative — not criminal — detentions. That means people were seized for civil violations such as overstaying visas or entering the country without authorization, not for violent offenses.
By late September, ICE agents were visiting more than 130 work sites across the District —construction zones, restaurants, hospitals and schools. Landscapers, caregivers and kitchen staff — the invisible backbone of Washington’s daily life — were detained in the name of “law and order.”
Yet the administration has provided no data showing how many of those arrested had criminal records.
“Many of the illegal aliens arrested during this operation were committing crimes or had outstanding warrants,” claimed White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson. However, neither Jackson nor the Department of Homeland Security produced evidence to support that claim.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser pushed back when the federal order expired.
“Immigration enforcement is not what MPD does,” Bowser said. “And with the end of the emergency, it won’t be what MPD does in the future.”
But the federal presence remains. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Park Police, and even the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division continue joint patrols near downtown, including near the White House.
The city’s residents — citizens and immigrants alike — now live under the shadow of federal raids and checkpoints.
“Our government is engaged in — by its own admission and by the tumultuous enforcement actions it has launched — a comprehensive campaign to uproot millions of families and hard-working men and women who have come to our country seeking a better life that includes contributing to building up the best elements of our culture and society,” said Archbishop of Washington Robert Cardinal McElroy in a Sept. 28 homily. “This campaign relies on fear and terror at its core, for the government knows that it cannot succeed in its efforts except by bringing new dimensions of fear and terror to our nation’s history and life.”
Lies Spread, Residents Live in Fear
Across the city, fear is spreading faster than facts. While claims immigrants are draining public resources is used to justify this militarized policing, evidence shows just the opposite.
Undocumented immigrants in the United States paid $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022 alone—nearly $9,000 per person. They contributed $25.7 billion to Social Security, even though they can never collect from it. Their state and local tax rate exceeds that of the top one percent of U.S. earners.
Still, Trump and his allies insist that these workers are “stealing” from America, telling the country that Democrats shut down the government to give away health care to “illegal immigrants.”
“Nowhere have Democrats suggested that we’re interested in changing federal law,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “The question for the president is whether he’s interested in protecting the health care of the American people.”
NBC News and NPR confirmed that undocumented immigrants do not qualify for Medicaid or for Affordable Care Act tax credits.
But facts no longer govern this war. Fear does. And in Washington, that fear wears a badge.
ICE data shows that fewer than 6% of immigrants detained nationwide have violent convictions. Yet here in the nation’s capital, more than a thousand people were rounded up in less than two months under the false promise of security.
At an event organized by the National Press Foundation, the mayor weighed in on the domino effect of the federal surge, according to NBC Washington.
“We’re concerned about community trust, because in a public’s eye, anybody in a uniform is the same, if for some people,” the mayor told a group of journalists from around the nation, “so our MPD, our police department, which we worked for 20 years to get them a great reputation, that has been terribly disrupted by the presidential emergency.”