After Democrats pummeled Republicans in this week’s midterm elections, “a tsunami of change is coming to our city and to the U.S. Capitol and to capitals across the United States,” declared D.C. Council member Brooke Pinto at the start of a hearing she chaired on Thursday.
Perhaps most immediately, Republican governors in five states that have sent National Guard troops to D.C. will be replaced by Democrats come January. Pinto called on those governors to remove their troops from the city on Day 1 of their terms. She also expressed her hope that “unsympathetic” or “hostile” Republican ears in Congress would soon be replaced by Democrats willing to help D.C. officials in their quest to stop the deployment.
But amid all the optimism and relief from the city’s Democratic officials, who for the past two years have weathered a series of GOP-led efforts to undermine the District’s autonomy, Thursday’s council hearing on federal law enforcement presence also laid bare the depth of many residents’ continued alarm. Dozens testified on several proposed bills to increase transparency around federal law enforcement and restrict police involvement in immigration matters. They also expressed continued concern with what they described as a lack of action from local officials to push back against Trump’s D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has shown no signs of scaling back its efforts in the District. On Thursday, a Department of Defense official confirmed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had, days before the election, authorized the use of dozens of patrol cars, military tactical vehicles and D.C. National Guard boats in support of federal and local law enforcement. Politico, which first reported on the new equipment, reported that the National Guard boats will conduct “perimeter security” for police in Anacostia and transport federal officers who will be around to help arrest suspects who try to evade law enforcement by jumping into the river.
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Pinto, a Democrat, said “boats and more military-grade vehicles and weapons is really the exact opposite of the approach that we need to be taking.”
“I am disturbed to see this administration continue to act in a way that is not supporting safety in the District, that’s not supporting safety in the nation’s capital, and that feels very un-American,” Pinto said.
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Still, Pinto and other D.C. officials received criticism of their own on Thursday from dozens of residents who said they wanted to see local leaders push back more on federal immigration enforcement and the National Guard presence in the District.
Myles Duffy, a Bruce-Monroe Elementary School parent, grew emotional as he described an incident in which he said more than a dozen soldiers and FBI agents were marching in front of recess. The agents were patrolling as part of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, authorities told The Washington Sun.
“What was the reason for this very expensive invasion of my kids’ school community?” Duffy said. “Right now, there’s zero transparency and zero accountability.”
A Mount Pleasant parent, Emma Kelly, said she had witnessed “many examples” of apparent joint patrols between D.C. police and federal immigration enforcement, whom she said she had seen around a D.C. police substation near her home.
“The collaboration between MPD and federal agencies has eliminated any trust,” she said.
Pinto said she hoped to help with a group of bills her judiciary committee is considering — including two that require D.C. police to release body camera footage and other information about federal officers who use serious force when they are present, and another that would bolster the city’s prohibition on local police aiding with civil immigration enforcement. Some of the transparency provisions, which require D.C. police to document the federal agents at the scenes of arrests and to release body camera footage they have of federal agents shooting people, are already in effect on an emergency basis. Many residents said the bills do not go far enough.
“There is a lot of frustration and fear in the community,” Pinto said. “I feel that. I agree with that, and we are doing everything we can locally to protect our city, and we’re calling on governors across the country to do their part and our federal partners to do their part.”
Interim Chief of Police Jeffery Carroll reiterated during Thursday’s hearing that D.C. police are not allowed to directly assist with federal immigration enforcement. “We are not going out there trying to give people to immigration authorities,” he said.
But he acknowledged that daily joint patrols with federal law enforcement do regularly put D.C. police officers in contact with agents who are authorized to enforce immigration laws — so, in theory, those federal agents could elect to do that work while on the streets with D.C. officers. The city’s Police Department still makes most arrests without feds, he said.
Carroll, appearing exasperated at times, said he had taken steps to respond to community feedback. He has directed D.C. police officers not to ride in the same cars as federal agents, he said, and advocated for limiting the number of cars in the joint local-federal caravans that patrol city streets. When he heard outcry from parents and students about National Guard troops outside schools, he said, he personally called the commander of the deployment to ask him to get the troops away from school campuses. And he hoped, he said, that having D.C. police accompany federal law enforcement would keep the latter focused on violent crime instead of nonviolent offenses or immigration.
“This is a situation that the Metropolitan Police Department does not want to be in,” Carroll said. “We don’t want kids to have to see military members carrying guns outside their school.”
But he said he could not control where the Trump administration directed its resources. For example, he said, he had no knowledge of Hegseth’s plan to deploy new military boats and humvees.
“I, too, read about it in a news article on my phone,” he said, in response to a question from Pinto about the news. “I don’t know what that means for MPD.”
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