Washington, DC, youth activist Afeni Evans has change into the newest 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 Desires volunteers had 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 outdoors the courtroom, and the fees in opposition to her had been dropped the subsequent 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 residence rule, which in any other case makes the town impartial 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 deliver 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 features that happen within the District of Columbia”.
However the fact 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 had been from Hyattsville, Maryland, in Prince George’s County, and never DC.
Trump’s strikes additionally fly within the face of one other fact: Crime is not any larger a problem in DC than it’s anyplace else in the US. Firstly of the yr, a joint report from the US Legal professional’s Workplace in DC and the Metropolitan Police Division (MPD) confirmed that the town’s violent crime fee had dropped by 35 p.c in 2024, reaching its lowest fee because the mid-Nineties. “Armed carjackings are down 53%,” in accordance with the report.
Washington, DC, is a superb stage for beta-testing how prepared 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 p.c) of the inhabitants, regardless of 30 years of middle-class (principally white) gentrification – white Washingtonians make up 39 p.c of DC’s inhabitants.
So, it’s not that shocking Trump would try such heavy-handed techniques in a delicate occupation of DC, significantly in a metropolis that was as soon as famously nicknamed “Chocolate Metropolis”. In a capital the place greater than 90 p.c of voters selected former Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump within the 2024 presidential election, Trump can also be sending the unvarnished and racist message that Black people, and particularly Black youth, are criminals.
Imposing a heightened police presence and tons of of Nationwide Guard troopers on a multiracial metropolis is nothing however a wannabe strongman’s try to seem sturdy to his anti-Black supporters.
DC is often known 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, significantly communities like Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, Adams Morgan, and elements of Shaw and Columbia Heights, turned a comparatively protected house within the Nineteen Sixties and 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 regulation enforcement and anti-immigrant businesses like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), along side the MPD – they’ve made dozens of arrests, and smothered nightlife and enterprise site visitors in these communities.
Trump, in his personal ham-fisted means, can also be trying to erase DC’s historical past as certainly one of protest and resistance. Because the US advanced right into a superpower, and DC remodeled into the worldwide neighborhood’s superpower metropolis throughout and after World Struggle II, the town additionally turned a spot for protest, significantly for racial justice and civil rights. Examples embrace the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, in addition to a sequence of antiwar protests in opposition to 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 Nineteen Sixties and Seventies. Large protests just like the 2017 Ladies’s March, the George Floyd protests in 2020 and the Free Palestine protests final yr have made DC a goal ripe for presidency overreach.
However what Trump is doing to DC in 2025 isn’t 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 obtainable sidewalk house across the White Home for protests “by 80 p.c”, 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 might do a photo-op close by on the steps of St John’s Church, calling himself “your president of regulation and order” alongside the way in which.
Trump has adopted within the footsteps of one other “regulation and order” president, Richard Nixon. In Could 1971, Nixon unleashed the Nationwide Guard and native police in opposition to 1000’s of antiwar demonstrators in DC, in what turned often called the Mayday protests, resulting in greater than 12,000 arrests over a three-day interval.
In 1932, President Herbert Hoover authorised the usage of navy drive in opposition to a ragtag group of 20,000 unemployed and unhoused World Struggle I veterans often called the Bonus Military. On the peak of the Nice Despair and in search of the bonus cash Congress owed them, the navy 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 demise 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 certainly one 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 global metropolis, and because the centre of the so-called Free World, is in peril. However its most weak and marginalised residents proceed to withstand, regardless of the hazards of Trump as a despot.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
