Washington, DC, youth activist Afeni Evans has change into the latest image of US President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of the town’s police.
On August 15, Metro Transit Cops pepper-sprayed and compelled the 28-year-old Evans to the bottom on the Navy Yard subway cease for allegedly committing fare evasion. Evans and different Harriet’s Wildest Goals volunteers have been on the station on “cop watch” to make sure the federal takeover wouldn’t result in harassment of Black youth. But, it occurred to 3 Black youths anyway, prompting Evans to intervene, which led to her arrest.
After public protests in DC and on social media, she was launched to cheering crowds exterior the courtroom, and the fees towards her have been dropped the following day.
Like with so many different points associated to Trump and his makes an attempt at autocracy, his use of the Nationwide Guard and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to stifle neighborhood ecosystems particularly impacts Washington’s Black, Brown and Queer residents. This effort to squash potential dissent is greater than a distraction from the Epstein information controversy or America’s financial troubles.
Domestically, it’s a partial finish to the District of Columbia’s half-century of dwelling rule, which in any other case makes the town unbiased of direct federal oversight. Nationally, it’s an open query about whether or not DC can stay a web site of protest, a spot the place marches and different gatherings can impact change and even happen in any respect within the present autocratic local weather.
Trump’s govt order saying his takeover of DC’s police drive on August 11 shouldn’t have come as a shock, particularly given his makes an attempt to convey the federal authorities’s energy to bear in California again in June. “Crime is uncontrolled within the District of Columbia”, the order reads, stating that the “enhance in violent crime within the coronary heart of our Republic… poses insupportable dangers to the very important federal capabilities that happen within the District of Columbia”.
However the reality is, Trump’s govt order manufactured a disaster out of far-right fantasies. Six days earlier than Trump’s announcement, two youngsters carjacked Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old former staffer on the Division of Authorities Effectivity, in DC’s Logan Circle. “We’re going to do one thing about it. That features bringing within the Nationwide Guard,” Trump mentioned within the aftermath of the incident.
Nonetheless, the 2 alleged carjackers in police custody have been from Hyattsville, Maryland, in Prince George’s County, and never DC.
Trump’s strikes additionally fly within the face of one other reality: Crime isn’t any larger a difficulty in DC than it’s wherever else in the USA. Initially of the 12 months, a joint report from the US Lawyer’s Workplace in DC and the Metropolitan Police Division (MPD) confirmed that the town’s violent crime price had dropped by 35 % in 2024, reaching its lowest price for the reason that mid-Nineties. “Armed carjackings are down 53%,” in keeping with the report.
Washington, DC, is a superb stage for beta-testing how keen the remainder of the US is to go to attain Trump’s dream of autocratic rule. DC stays a majority-minority metropolis, with Black Washingtonians making up a plurality (43 %) of the inhabitants, regardless of 30 years of middle-class (largely white) gentrification – white Washingtonians make up 39 % of DC’s inhabitants.
So, it isn’t that shocking Trump would try such heavy-handed techniques in a mushy occupation of DC, notably in a metropolis that was as soon as famously nicknamed “Chocolate Metropolis”. In a capital the place greater than 90 % of voters selected former Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump within the 2024 presidential election, Trump can be sending the unvarnished and racist message that Black people, and particularly Black youth, are criminals.
Imposing a heightened police presence and a whole lot of Nationwide Guard troopers on a multiracial metropolis is nothing however a wannabe strongman’s try to look robust to his anti-Black supporters.
DC is also referred to as a spot that holds significance for Queer People. One out of each seven adults within the nation’s capital identifies as LGBTQIA+, roughly 80,000 Washingtonians in all. Northwest DC, notably communities like Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, Adams Morgan, and components of Shaw and Columbia Heights, turned a comparatively protected area within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies for Queer tradition and companies to thrive. The inaugural Nationwide March for Lesbian and Homosexual Rights started in DC in 1979.
It shouldn’t shock anybody that an anti-Queer Trump administration would additionally goal DC’s Queer and migrant areas. The federalised police presence in DC has been particularly noticeable alongside the 14th Road and U Road corridors, together with the set up of not-so-random checkpoints over the previous couple of weeks. Inevitably – between the Nationwide Guard, federal legislation enforcement and anti-immigrant businesses like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), along with the MPD – they’ve made dozens of arrests, and smothered nightlife and enterprise visitors in these communities.
Trump, in his personal ham-fisted method, can be trying to erase DC’s historical past as one in every of protest and resistance. Because the US developed right into a superpower, and DC reworked into the worldwide neighborhood’s superpower metropolis throughout and after World Battle II, the town additionally turned a spot for protest, notably for racial justice and civil rights. Examples embody the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, in addition to a collection of antiwar protests towards Vietnam between 1965 and 1971. Marches and protests for the Equal Rights Modification, for a Homosexual Rights Invoice, for Chicano rights, Indigenous rights, and migrant and refugee rights got here alongside civil rights marches and protests all through the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies. Huge protests just like the 2017 Girls’s March, the George Floyd protests in 2020 and the Free Palestine protests final 12 months have made DC a goal ripe for presidency overreach.
However what Trump is doing to DC in 2025 is just not fairly unprecedented – not for him, and never for the federal authorities. In 2018, throughout Trump’s first time period as president, the US Nationwide Park Service (NPS) sought to shrink the out there sidewalk area across the White Home for protests “by 80 %”, and to cost demonstrators allow charges “to permit the NPS to get better a number of the prices” of public security provisions. On June 1, 2020, the Nationwide Guard and the US Park Police tear-gassed, lobbed concussion grenades and violently arrested George Floyd protesters at Lafayette Sq., throughout the road from the White Home – all in order that Trump may do a photo-op close by on the steps of St John’s Church, calling himself “your president of legislation and order” alongside the way in which.
Trump has adopted within the footsteps of one other “legislation and order” president, Richard Nixon. In Could 1971, Nixon unleashed the Nationwide Guard and native police towards 1000’s of antiwar demonstrators in DC, in what turned often known as the Mayday protests, resulting in greater than 12,000 arrests over a three-day interval.
In 1932, President Herbert Hoover authorised using army drive towards a ragtag group of 20,000 unemployed and unhoused World Battle I veterans often known as the Bonus Military. On the top of the Nice Melancholy and on the lookout for the bonus cash Congress owed them, the army responded with fuel grenades, bayonets, flamethrowers and tanks, destroying their shantytowns alongside the Nationwide Mall and Anacostia River. Two veterans died, whereas the Military injured 1000’s of others. The ensuing tear fuel cloud over the town additionally led to the loss of life of an toddler.
Trump and his small military of occupiers are attempting to make an instance out of the nation’s capital, to destroy the DC of the previous century, its vibrancy and resistance. The irony, after all, is that one in every of Trump’s first acts in his second time period was to pardon greater than 1,500 insurrectionists who had been a part of the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol, a lethal and treasonous occasion.
Now, Trump needs to cower Washingtonians into accepting autocracy.
DC’s legacy because the nationwide seat of energy, as a world metropolis, and because the centre of the so-called Free World, is in peril. However its most susceptible and marginalised residents proceed to withstand, regardless of the hazards of Trump as a despot.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
