Capital Under Federal Occupation – Now What?

Growing up in Washington, D.C. creates a cache of memories where newsworthy national events juxtapose the mundanity of everyday life. From an average 2021-asynchronous-learning-Wednesday ending with an insurrection to Barack Obama assisting in building your elementary school playground there's a certain level of strangeness that’s half-jokingly accepted by residents. But being home this summer was different. When more than 2,200 National Guard troops conducted a federal takeover of my hometown, it was beyond dystopic, and revealed layers of D.C. politics that demand our attention.

In June, the House of Representatives passed three separate bills restricting D.C.’s right to home rule, paving the way for the federal occupation of D.C.. Not only did the House revoke the right for noncitizen residents of D.C. to vote in local elections, but they also took away the city’s ability to discipline local police for misconduct. After Mayor Muriel Bowser’s push to end the district’s sanctuary city status — which the D.C. council then halted — the House voted to mandate cooperation between local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All three bills jeopardize the 1973 Home Rule Act (HRA), which grants the bare amount of autonomy to the district, such as an elected city council to run the day-to-day of the city rather than a federally imposed commissioner.

While these bills passed without much commotion, the reality of a politically weakened D.C. became horrifyingly apparent in the middle of August, when Trump announced his federal takeover. Through federalizing local police and activating the D.C. National Guard — of which he is the commander-in-chief — he justified this abuse of power as a response to “out-of-control” crime in D.C. This argument is reminiscent of Rep. Andrew Garbarino’s (R-N.Y.-02) law-and-order rhetoric used to repeal the city’s police accountability law just a month earlier. The particular event that catalyzed this takeover? A 19-year-old DOGE employee, nicknamed “Big Balls,” was assaulted at 3 a.m. by two 15-year-olds. 

D.C.’s sole non-voting House-sit-in-the-room-er, Eleanor Holmes Norton, is one the city’s three shadow congresspeople whose primary job is to petition for D.C. statehood, because D.C. — along with Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands — does not get the same voting power in Congress as states. In responding to Trump’s announcement of the takeover that would federalize the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) for the first time ever, Norton presented empirical evidence that crime in D.C. is at a 30-year low, which social media users proudly reposted on Instagram stories. 

This takeover is not really about crime, as evidenced by the statistics, and insistence that the only way to reduce “crime” in D.C. is for the entire city to be overrun by federal agents who, facing little crime, are now landscaping with mulch. The focus on the crime narrative coming from both Trump and his opposition distracts from the larger fight for autonomy through statehood. 

The HRA limits the initial “emergency” executive takeover of local police to 48 hours, though federal control can potentially extend up to 30 days without additional congressional approval. Legal experts don’t actually know how long this takeover can last because of the absence of any case law on D.C.’s National Guard and because of the now six Republican governors who have sent their own National Guard troops to the city. 

With no end in sight, federal agents, now-armed, are spontaneously setting up traffic checkpoints demanding to see papers; houseless encampments are being bulldozed; tanks are roving outside of metro stations; unmarked vehicles are showing up at daycares; National Guard troops are stalking the streets in packs, escalating and inventing danger; federal agents are breaking into cars and tackling people riding mopeds; ICE agents are kidnapping family members on their way to work; schools are sending out “best practices” for how students and family members can hope to get to and from school safely; and many are terrified to leave their homes. 

Our city is not sitting silently: Coalitions have organized regular protests, neighbors have shooed away ICE, communities have birthed and bolstered support networks, but so long as D.C. is not a state, our attempts to protect our community can only be reactive. 

While I personally have privileges that allow me to walk around outside feeling pretty confident that I would not be targeted by federal agents, everyone knows someone whose family has been directly impacted by the surge of ICE kidnappings. Before returning to Amherst, my last 12 hours in D.C., unfortunately, captured the state of the city eerily well. I attended an inspiring Free D.C. rally and march (with federal agents circling nearby), alerted a local grassroots ICE watch group, walked past multiple armed national guards, and then arrived at Union Station, which was declared under Trump’s control just the day before. As the shock wears off and this becomes scarily routine, it’s refreshing to be reminded that this dystopian nightmare is not normal. Our community cannot afford to let this continue.

Our fight for statehood is rooted in upending the racist disenfranchisement of residents and building upon the Revolutionary War principle of no taxation without representation (as written on our license plates). This federal occupation is a continued reminder that, despite being the capital of this so-called democracy, the 700,000 residents of the district continue to be denied access to basic democratic rights.

We must identify the parallels and interconnectedness of fascist federal military occupations globally and domestically. People outside of D.C. need to stand against the military occupation there, not only because of the substantial risk it could be expanded to other blue cities (as threatened for Chicago and Baltimore), but also because of the dangerous precedent it sets for anti-democratic executive overreach. And it is important to recognize that other blue cities have a governor with the constitutional mandate as commander-in-chief of their National Guard, a mayoral willingness to take a less placating approach, and more generally, representatives who can vote in the House and Senate, checking the executive. This city-by-city approach of shutting down existing (or threatened) federal occupations is insufficient in protecting anyone and leaves officials and residents anxiously glued to wondering if their home will be targeted next, rather than addressing this ironically traditional democratic idea of expanding the federal government beyond what the will of the people has articulated. 

We need to galvanize more national understanding and support for D.C.’s anti-occupation movement in the short term. In the long term, we need to invest in D.C.’s right to fully govern itself and advocate for it to gain statehood and voting representatives. The D.C. Admission Act, H.R. 51, was first presented in 2019 and continues to be reintroduced every two years — successfully passing in the House on multiple occasions, but not becoming law due to conservative blocs in the Senate.

The American left, especially outside of D.C., needs to rally against the microcosm of authoritarianism that D.C. has become if it wants any hope for democracy to persist nationwide. This can begin on the individual level. For people who live in a state, call your representatives. Amherst has students from all 50 states. This means that every senator is obligated to listen to an Amherst student. Call, email, and annoy your congressional representatives. Their contact info can be found here.