The Trump administration’s friendly neighborhood military takeover of Washington

If you head to Washington seeking evidence of the city’s military takeover, you are very likely to come away disappointed. Despite often shocking scenes captured on video circulating on YouTube and other social media platforms, the District of Columbia appears not to be in the throes of a Latin American-style occupation. (So far, that is, more troops are on the way.)

Yes, members of the National Guard are patrolling the National Mall, Union Station and commuter outposts along the city’s Metro system. And agents and officers from an alphabet soup of federal agencies are joining Metro Police on arrest executions and at times on street patrol, but you can visit different neighborhoods of the city from low- to high-crime districts, as I did on Aug. 24 and 25, and not come across a single one of them.

A federal takeover?

Not a Humvee or other armored personnel carrier is in sight near Washington’s various monuments or parked alongside Union Station, where a breezy protest encampment has yet to be bulldozed by federal troops.

“I’m a veteran myself,” Mr. Kindle explains, “so the way they’re treated is really important for me, and I’ve instilled that in all of our folks here.”

The citizen-soldiers coming into Washington are young and likely inexperienced with protests. “It can be scary,” Mr. Kindle says, adding that some protesters may perceive the military presence as a form of oppression that requires a strong pushback. He wants to humanize both sides before that kind of face-off happens.

“So I’ve talked to the [National Guard], and said, ‘Hey, this is what’s gonna happen. We’re going to have some people that get a little heated. Don’t take it personally. It’s about the uniform and what it represents right now and not you.’”

Mr. Kindle maintains that Flare does not want “to protest the Guard,” but the administration that brought it here. His biggest concern about the various schemes to federalize law enforcement in big cities is the continuing use of masks and lack of identification by federal agents. As career officers and agents are pushed out, he worries of a potential infiltration of federal law enforcement agencies by individuals emerging from the nation’s extreme right.

And Flare’s more organized effort is not the only protest persisting in Washington despite the federal takeover. Michael Lilek, a former Naval officer and retired project manager, cuts small circles on a commuter bike in front of the U.S. Capitol building. His bike is festooned with various messages, one—in anatomically colorful language—urges Republican members of Congress to locate the fortitude necessary to challenge the current resident of nearby 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“It’s incredible to me that the Republican Party was able to find that many people with so little self-respect or so little integrity or so little knowledge of history that they would kowtow to this vulgarian,” he explains.

His more or less daily bike protest, he says, results because “we can’t stay silent.… I had to do something.”

Mr. Lilek lives nearby and has observed the buildup of the National Guard on the Capitol grounds. “I think a lot of people are outraged by it,” he says, allowing, “maybe there’s some people that welcome it, too.”

“But I think most people see it as the stunt that it is. It’s just something else to distract from what’s going on.” His small protest signs suggest that he believes “what’s going on” is a slow surrender of democracy and stability. 

A city they don’t recognize

But if Washington has not been transformed into a scene from a Costa-Gavras film, neither does it seem to resemble the criminal hellscape described by the president and his supporters in the media.

Theron Law and Sabrina Moore, both in medical scrubs, are taking a break from work just outside the Dupont Circle Metro station Monday morning. Behind them, two National Guard soldiers determinedly walk a circuit up and down the station’s escalators, then across the street to the other entrance, where they start all over again. The Washington residents live in two rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods—Mr. Law in Congress Heights and Ms. Moore along the city’s southwest waterfront.

They pronounce themselves dumbfounded by the way the press and the president talk about Washington. It’s a city they don’t recognize, they tell me.

“Sure, there is crime here,” Mr. Law says, “and you have to be careful—don’t stay out too late and stay out of some areas.”

But crime is no worse in Washington than it is in other large cities, they say.

Treating Washington “like a war zone” is just a display “for the tourists and the politicians,” Ms. Moore says.

“I think it’s all a distraction,” Mr. Law adds. “I don’t know what it is distracting from yet, but it’s distracting from something.”

Stanley Jackson is the president and chief executive of the Anacostia Economic Development Corporation, a community organization seeking to create economic opportunity, affordable housing and other improvements in a Washington neighborhood that has been historically overlooked. Anacostia’s problems with crime should put it at the top of the list for federally auxiliary efforts, but aside from checkpoints that have proved a community annoyance and an opportunity to round up suspected unauthorized immigrants, Mr. Jackson says he has not seen much evidence of safer streets.

“Other than for political theater, I don’t really see the impact,” he says. “People are going about their business, but obviously there’s a chilling effect in our city now.” Folks, particularly Latino residents of Anacostia, are staying home, he says. He believes that civic withdrawal will begin to have an economic impact on the city.

The relentless focus on immigrants, he suggests, will hurt Washington’s restaurants and hotels and its construction industry. “You can’t take that kind of revenue stream out of a municipality and think that it can continue to flourish,” Mr. Jackson says. “It’s just counterproductive.”

He describes Anacostia as a neighborhood in transition, pressed by gentrification but still at the end of the line for the city’s attention. He thinks the community and its people have a wealth of talent and energy to offer Washington, if given the chance to stay and participate in the transition that is taking place. And it is to that goal he wishes the federal government would direct its vast resources. He prefers not troops but investments that would have a long-term impact on crime and the quality of life in Anacostia and throughout Washington.

He notes instead that decisions by the Republican-led Congress in March pulled $1 billion from the municipal budget. Leaders of big cities led by Democrats around the country complain that other federal budget cuts and rescissions of allocated federal disbursements have reduced local anti-crime capacity.

“All of this to me is almost intentional,” Mr. Jackson says, “creating an outcome to justify your conduct.”

“You’re cutting [food] vouchers; you’re cutting programs that serve the needy, the children…what is the endgame? If this is about making America great, how is this achieving that objective?”

The Rev. Mr. Timothy Tilghman, a deacon at St. Teresa of Ávila Catholic Church in Anacostia, has yet to encounter any evidence of the improved street protection Trump officials claim Washington is experiencing, but he does find the latest anti-crime campaign and the rhetoric accompanying it painfully familiar.

“If you’ve been around a big city for a long time and if you’ve been in an African American community or community of color, there are requests to have resources delivered to the neighborhood,” he says. “‘Boy, if we had more teachers, if we had more counselors, if we had more after-school programs,’ then we could do something to turn around the violence and we could turn around the blight because people would have the skill sets and have the relationships to be able to do those things.”

“I’ve never seen a time when the government didn’t have enough money to call up the National Guard or to pay police overtime,” Mr. Tilghman says. But “they never have enough money to create one more small program in the neighborhood that would make a significant, positive difference.”

The president has now variously suggested sending the National Guard into Baltimore, New York, Chicago and Boston despite the fact that, like Washington, those cities have been experiencing historic lows or sharp recent declines in crime.

Federalizing policing and calling in the guard “is not the way to invest in depressed neighborhoods period,” he says. “And Washington is no different. This is not turning that around.”

Despite the president’s security buildup, “they still shoot people in those neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River, pretty much every day,” Mr. Tilghman says.

The Guard on patrol

The members of the National Guard I spoke with around town did not want their names to be used, offering up contact info for the Guard’s public affairs office and declining to say one way or the other if they had been ordered outright not to speak to the press. Despite whatever press prohibitions they had been issued, they did express their willingness to be in Washington to serve the city as they may be asked. Did they know how or for how long that might be?

Three young men from Louisiana patrolling Union Station, the only military presence that I could locate there, seemed delighted to be in the nation’s capital, which they enthusiastically described as a “beautiful city.”

On a brilliant summer day in Washington, who could argue with them? These citizen soldiers say that they would know more about their mission in the nation’s capital when someone in authority tells them. Otherwise everything is “TBD, to be determined.”

“Our mission is D.C.—safe and beautiful,” one soldier, a young woman from West Virginia patrolling the National Mall, says.

“My opinion is that there is a job that needs doing and we’re here to get the job done,” another West Virginia Guard member says.

On reports that they would soon be carrying weapons, the soldiers could only shrug. “Everything that you guys [in the press] know is probably what we know also,” one says. “Everything that happens is very last minute, so whatever you guys find out, we’ll find it out.” (National Guard members were issued weapons that day.)

The Guard members say they have been treated kindly by tourist and resident alike since arriving in their nation’s capital, but comments pro and con on their deployment have been “50-50.” With impeccable timing, a woman passing by breaks from her group of friends to express her gratitude and support for these new guardians of the National Mall.

“I love you guys,” she gushes as the soldiers smile and express their thanks.

This is the fear

The administration has claimed sharp improvements in street safety since the federalization ordered by the president on Aug. 11. But National Guard members, at least for now, are prohibited from making arrests of U.S. residents and citizens, and federal agents have primarily been tagging along with Metro Police while those officers go about their daily business. Among the numbers of arrests and detentions touted each night by administration officials are increasingly people stopped for visa and other immigration violations.

They have been Washington residents who just days ago could have moved without anxiety through the city on their way to work, to visit family, to go shopping or to practice their faith. 

At a 6 p.m. Spanish Mass at the Shrine of the Sacred Heart, a parish built by Irish immigrants in 1922 and now a spiritual home to Catholics from Vietnam, Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala and many other countries, I follow along as best I can. Outside the Columbia Heights streets are alive with traffic and activity.

Beyond the church doors, vendors ready to hawk ice cream, sodas and other treats wait for the Mass to end and for their customers to spill out in front of the church. There are no signs of federal officers outside, either on patrol or hoping to scoop up some undocumented immigrants to get closer to their quota for the week.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security reports on Aug. 28 that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported nearly 200,000 people in the first seven months of the Trump administration. That means ICE is on track for the highest number of removals since the Obama administration, but it is still falling short of the Trump administration’s deportation target of 1 million people this year.

Surveying the pews, I wonder how many here left their homes in fear and how many did not come at all. I wonder how many of my brothers and sisters standing and kneeling and praying with me in this celebration in the coming months will find their lives thrown into disarray. How many will end up jailed or deported? What will happen to these smiling children all around me when that day comes and their fathers, their mothers or both are separated from them?

The thoughts are disheartening. The potential suffering seems so great and so pointless.

Above the ornate altar where a Portuguese priest is elevating the Eucharist before this congregation of Spanish-speaking people from across our shared hemisphere, a fragment of a psalm is inscribed: “The Lord shall sit king forever. The Lord shall bless his people with peace.”

It is a small but welcome consolation this evening.

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