The District of Columbia is suing the Trump administration over its takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department.
The District’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, filed a lawsuit alleging the Trump administration violated the law when it put local police under federal control.
“By illegally declaring a takeover of MPD, the Administration is abusing its temporary, limited authority under the law,” Schwalb posted on X Friday. “This is the gravest threat to Home Rule DC has ever faced, and we are fighting to stop it.”
The Department of Justice declined to comment.
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The suit is the first major pushback by D.C. officials over the federal takeover, which started on Monday and is expected to last for at least 30 days — potentially longer. The legal action also adds to the hundreds of legal battles the Trump administration will have to undertake as it pursues unprecedented expansions of executive power.
Late Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi put the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terry Cole, in charge of local police — sidelining Mayor Muriel Bowser’s appointment and administration.
The city’s police chief filed a declaration in support of the lawsuit, saying the “upending of the command structure will endanger public safety, placing the lives of MPD officers and District residents at grave risk.”
“In my nearly three decades in law enforcement, I have never seen a single government action that would cause a greater threat to law and order than this dangerous directive,” Chief Pamela Smith wrote of Bondi’s order.
In his suit, Schwalb argues that the Trump administration’s takeover violates the District of Columbia’s limited autonomy granted through the Home Rule Act. The core complaint is that Trump’s actions exceed the narrow authority granted to him in Section 740, which he invoked on Monday.
He argues in the lawsuit that Trump’s basis for the emergency takeover, a spike in violent crime, was not true.
“The President did not identify any new or unusual exigency that justified the invocation of Section 740,” he wrote. “Instead, he claimed that violent crime in the District is ‘increasing,’ when, in fact, it has fallen 26% since 2024.”
Trump has said those statistics are fraudulent.
Bowser, who caught flak from city residents after leaving town on Thursday, criticized the appointment of the DEA chief.
“There is no statute that conveys the District’s personnel authority to a federal official,” Bowser argued in an X post. She said that city officials have already complied to the fullest extent of the law by providing services from MPD to Trump’s federal takeover already.
Along with putting the DEA chief in charge, Bondi tried to force local police to help out immigration enforcement officers, undoing the local “sanctuary city” policies that the city put in place to help protect its undocumented residents from incoming raids and sweeps from the roaming droves of armed federal agents.
The Trump administration also sent hundreds of National Guard troops to help patrol, leading the city’s 700,000 residents to see an unusually militarized presence and show of federal force.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly promised to take over the city, which he has called “a filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment.”
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