This week, I dropped my daughter off for her first day of preschool near my home in Washington, D.C.’s Petworth neighborhood. Outside the building’s entrance, the school’s family-teacher organization had set up a table to welcome new parents. On the table lay the usual suspects for such a gathering: coffee, doughnuts and contact information for the organization. Alongside them sat something else, though: a stack of small, red cards.
If you’re not an immigrant or a relative of an immigrant, you’re probably not familiar with the “red card.” Created by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, one side lists the bearer’s constitutional rights in that person’s language of choice. The other side, in English, is designed to be shown to an immigration agent if the bearer is stopped, with statements like “I choose to exercise my constitutional rights.”
It is utterly twisted that equipping parents with tools to assert their basic rights would be necessary on such a momentous day. And yet, that is life during President Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C.
If you are an immigrant in our community, they are not questioning whether you are documented, whether you have papers.”
In asserting control over D.C.’s police department and deploying thousands of National Guard troops to the city’s streets, the White House has insisted that this intervention is “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” as Trump put it. “For the first time in their lives, [D.C. residents] can use the parks, they can walk on the streets,” said adviser Stephen Miller two weeks later.
To be clear, while crime in the city hit a 30-year low last year, residents still want safer streets. In a recent Washington Post poll, over 70% of Washingtonians said crime was a “moderately,” “very” or “extremely” serious problem. Yet nearly 80% opposed the takeover and troop deployment. As someone born in Washington and who has lived here my whole life, I have a simple explanation for that discrepancy: Pretty much anyone living in D.C. can see every day that the White House’s justification is a lie.
The National Guard units, for instance, have largely been deployed at tourist hubs like Union Station and the Washington Monument, but not where people actually live. During my own commute between Petworth, a residential neighborhood, and my workplace near the Capitol, only at the latter are National Guard members visible. Reports of troops acting as law enforcement are far rarer than videos of troops working on “beautification projects” — i.e., picking up trash. And at an estimated cost of $1 million per day, that’s an expensive garbage collection operation.
My neighborhood, meanwhile, is part of Ward 4, which has the largest Hispanic population of the city’s eight wards. The National Guard rarely makes its way up there, but, as the stack of red cards at my daughter’s school suggests, there is plenty of immigration enforcement. “If you are an immigrant in our community, they are not questioning whether you are documented, whether you have papers,” Janeese Lewis George, who represents Ward 4 on the D.C. Council, said recently. “They are literally going up to anyone in our neighborhoods and communities and taking them.”
As a result, reports Martin Austermuhle of the local news outlet The 51st, “creeping suspicions that MPD officers are cooperating with the efforts are making residents think twice about calling local police to report crimes they’ve witnessed — or been victims of.” So much for public safety.
Whenever it does end, though, there’s only one way to prevent it from happening again: granting D.C. statehood.
In different parts of D.C., a number of other law enforcement agencies have a heavier presence. But a review of arrest data from The New York Times found that “the operation has been more of a sprawling dragnet than a targeted crime-fighting operation.”
“Officers from some of the nation’s most elite federal law enforcement agencies,” the Times reports, “are often conducting traffic stops, performing low-dollar buy-and-bust drug operations or checking to see whether someone is drinking liquor from an open container.” Meanwhile, local restaurants suffer and tourists shy away from the city — some scared away by the White House’s claims that crime is rampant, others unsettled by the deployments themselves.
To top everything off, while parents at my daughter’s school worry about dropping off their children, this same week a shooter killed two children at a school in Minneapolis. It was the 434th school shooting since the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, which surely qualifies as a public safety emergency no matter the criteria. Yet after every one of these shootings, the political right insists we can’t regulate the weapons that help monsters to mass-murder children. Because if we did, they say, what would stop the government from deploying troops in the streets?
And now that deployment has happened — and these very same people are applauding!
It’s not clear how this occupation — for that, in practice, is what it amounts to — ends. While Trump needs Congress to sign off on his takeover of the D.C. police, he can keep the National Guard here as long as he wants.
Whenever it does end, though, there’s only one way to prevent it from happening again: granting D.C. statehood.
Seven hundred thousand Americans live in the district, more than Vermont and Wyoming, and nearly as many as Alaska and South Dakota. Let the 700,000 decide how they wish to be policed. Let the 700,000 have a real say in how their tax dollars — more than $40 billion last year alone — are spent. Let the 700,000 have the same rights and autonomy that other Americans do. And don’t leave us as a plaything for a future president.