About 50 people are demonstrating on one of Washington’s liveliest streets. They carry signs reading “Troops Out of D.C.,” “Free D.C. Send the Troops Home,” and “We Want Statehood Now.” A young woman chants slogans through a megaphone against Donald Trump’s administration. The air is hot and humid, and storm clouds loom overhead. The protest coincides with the first anniversary of the U.S. president’s controversial decision to deploy National Guard troops to the capital in order to “liberate Washington, D.C.” from homelessness and crime.
“Our capital city has been taken over by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” Trump said in mid-August 2025, in a description that bore little resemblance to reality. Crime statistics were at their lowest level in 30 years. “Crime, savagery, filth and scum will disappear,” he wrote that day on Truth Social, in the hyperbolic rhetoric that has become his trademark. Violent crime in the U.S. capital fell by 35% in 2024, the year before Trump returned to the Oval Office, according to Metropolitan Police Department data.
But Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 with the idea of conquering Washington, a city where he had never felt entirely comfortable and where 90% of voters backed the Democrats, and of settling scores with his enemies. He used an attempted assault on a government employee to put his plan into action. In early August last year, Edward Coristine, an employee of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), then led by Elon Musk to cut public spending, was attacked during an attempted carjacking. It was the perfect pretext for Trump to announce the deployment of troops in Washington.
Since then, groups of young service members, many sporting the wispy mustaches that seem fashionable among them, have patrolled major avenues and busy streets, stationed themselves at Metro stations, and marched in formation through the city’s tourist landmarks, including the National Mall, the vast green expanse linking Washington’s centers of power with the symbols of its history. They greet people politely and smile, but rarely intervene to ensure public safety. Dressed in military uniforms and carrying pistols, handcuffs and other equipment, they do not step in when disturbances occur. They are deterrents. And their presence has unsettled many residents, who say they feel intimidated. According to a poll published by The Washington Post, 79% of the capital’s residents oppose the measure.
“It has been a year since the invasion of the city began. This demonstration is important because it draws attention to Washington residents’ opposition to the presence of military troops, federal agents and the migra [immigration police],” says Benjamin Zinevich Rodríguez, a 29-year-old who serves as a spokesman for the protesters gathered at the corner of 14th Street and U Street, one of the capital’s busiest hubs.
As fellow demonstrators chant slogans around him, Zinevich explains that the group he represents is called the Party for Socialism and Liberation. He says it is working to secure statehood for Washington so that the city can gain greater self-government. The nation’s capital is, in fact, a federal district, with authority divided among the city government, Congress and the White House in an unusual arrangement devised at the country’s founding to prevent the capital from wielding too much influence.
A year after troops were deployed to the city, about 4,500 soldiers are patrolling Washington, compared with 3,800 officers in the Metropolitan Police Department. An analysis by the Niskanen Center, a conservative think tank, estimated that the government spends $607 a day on each soldier, compared with $384 for a police officer. “If you actually want to improve public safety in the District of Columbia, give the District of Columbia Police Department $100 million to go hire competent, qualified, appropriately trained police,” Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware argued.
The U.S. president also sent additional troops to other Democrat-run cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, but a court order forced him to withdraw them at the end of last year.
The White House recently issued an order to keep them on the streets until the end of Trump’s term in January 2029, a decision expected to cost an estimated $1.4 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the military deployment in Washington cost $225 million in 2025 and that each additional month would add another $55 million. By its calculations, the operation in the capital will have cost nearly $3 billion by the end of Trump’s presidency. The Pentagon has approved a budget of nearly $300 million to find apartment buildings to house the troops instead of paying for hotel rooms, which are more expensive, a move that underscores the long-term nature of the mission.
“National Guard troops should only be deployed for true emergencies, like natural disasters or a riot at the capitol that attempts to disrupt the transfer of presidential power. Our country’s National Guard troops must not be political props,” Monica Hopkins, head of the American Civil Liberties Union of DC (ACLU-DC), writes in an article.
Hopkins warned of the risk of normalizing the military’s presence on the streets. “We cannot become numb to the sight of military troops patrolling our neighborhoods. We cannot let military deployment on the streets of the United States become normal or acceptable as a part of daily life here or anywhere else,” she adds in a separate statement.
The operation in Washington is unprecedented in both scale and duration. Until the Iran war, it was the largest domestic military operation undertaken by the Pentagon. At its peak, the operation involved more than 5,000 troops from 18 states, nearly all of them Republican-led, deployed during the week of celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.
“The idea of the military supplanting civilian authorities for any reason, no matter how temporary, is simply incompatible with our constitutional system,” writes José Nunn in an article for the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal think tank.
A year has passed since troops began patrolling the city, and while public safety has improved and crime has fallen, experts are not convinced that the drop can be attributed to Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents. Crime has been declining across the country.
A study by the Niskanen Center found that the military presence may have had an impact on opportunistic crimes, such as shoplifting and petty theft, but not on more serious violent offenses. “While the Guard’s deployment reduced the occurrence of specific crimes, it was (and remains) a blunt and expensive instrument.t,” the report concludes.
Trump, however, continues to tout the decision as a success. “Crime is down 84% [in Washington], and I did that in a short period of time,” he said last week from the Oval Office.
An analysis by Reuters of 16,000 court records found that National Guard troops were largely dispatched to minor incidents in wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods with relatively low crime rates. Troops were rarely seen in southeastern neighborhoods such as Anacostia, home to some of the city’s most troubled areas.
“Unmitigated ICE activity in American cities and out-of-state National Guard troops in DC remain problematic,” Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said recently on social media. “Ultimately, we demonstrated practically and politically that there was no need for extended federal emergency action.”
Soldiers are trained for military operations overseas, but they receive little preparation for policing or urban public safety work, which require a different set of skills and techniques. The Trump administration designated them as federal marshals to give them enforcement authority, but a judge barred them from carrying out arrests without a prior warrant. As a result, they can detain suspects temporarily, but must call police officers to make any arrest official. During the first months of the mission, National Guard members could often be seen emptying trash bins, performing gardening and brush-clearing work in parks, or shoveling snow during the winter.
“When I got here, it was a very dangerous capital,” Trump said last week, touting the decline in crime in Washington. “Now you can walk down the street. […] People aren’t going to get mugged and beat to hell and shot and killed in Washington, D.C., [it’s] one of the safest places.”
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