Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office in May. Photo / Annabelle Gordon, For The Washington Post
The FBI has begun dispatching about 120 of its agents in overnight shifts to help local law enforcement prevent carjackings and violent crime in Washington, according to two people familiar with the matter, as President Donald Trump threatens a federal takeover of the nation’s capital.
Trump, who plans a news conference at the White House tomorrow on this topic, compared the forthcoming action against Washington DC crime to his Administration’s aggressive crackdown against illegal immigration at the southern border.
He said today that he plans to “immediately clear out the city’s homeless population and take swift action against crime”.
“Be prepared! There will be no “MR. NICE GUY.” We want our Capital BACK,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform.
The deployment of FBI agents to deal with local crime puts agents from the bureau’s counterintelligence, public corruption, and other divisions with minimal training in traffic stops out on the streets in potentially dangerous encounters, diverting them from their typical jobs at the bureau.
And it comes as Trump is publicly portraying the city as rampant with violent crime - even as the mayor refutes that characterisation, pointing to police data showing a drop in violent crime.
Last week, Trump ordered federal law enforcement agents from several agencies to be deployed on city streets and called for more juveniles to be charged in the adult justice system.
Staffing assignments this weekend reveal for the first time how many new FBI resources the Trump Administration could divert to local crime and the frustration it has caused within the bureau.
In recent days, the Administration has authorised up to 120 agents, largely from the FBI’s Washington field office, to work overnight shifts for at least one week alongside DC police and other federal law enforcement officers in the capital, according to the people familiar with those efforts.
FBI agents generally do not have authority to make traffic stops, and the people said the agents’ roles could include supporting the other agencies during traffic stops.
The FBI also is dispatching agents from outside DC, including Philadelphia, to help with the surge of federal law enforcement in the district, according to multiple people familiar with the plans.
Federal land is scattered across Washington, and local enforcement often works alongside federal law enforcement to patrol these and surrounding areas.
The US Park Police and Secret Service - which have more experience patrolling streets - typically do this work, not the FBI.
The Secret Service and the US Secret Service Uniformed Division have also been directed to launch special patrols in DC, according to a White House official.
The Trump Administration has not asked the DC police department - the chief law enforcement agency responsible for policing local crime - on how best to deploy these federal resources, according to a senior official with the department.
Because DC is not a state, the federal government has unique authority to exert control over the city - even amid objections from the residents and locally elected government.
The Home Rule Act of 1973 gave DC residents the ability to elect their own mayor and council members. A federal takeover of the DC police force would be an extraordinary assertion of power in a place where local leaders have few avenues to resist federal encroachment.
“Agents from the FBI Washington field office continue to participate in the increased federal law enforcement presence in DC, which includes assisting our law enforcement partners,” the FBI said.
Trump has been ramping up his criticisms on the capital in recent days. Last week, the President posted on social media a photo of a former US Doge Service staffer who was injured in an attempted carjacking.
Soon after the attack, DC police arrested a 15-year-old boy and girl from Maryland and charged them with unarmed carjacking.
“I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “It’s all going to happen very fast, just like the Border.”
In a different social media post, Trump said the White House news conference tomorrow NZT will be about the city’s cleanliness, its physical renovation, and its general condition.
“The Mayor of DC, Muriel Bowser, is a good person who has tried, but she has been given many chances, and the Crime Numbers get worse, and the City only gets dirtier and less attractive,” Trump said in the post.
Bowser (Democrat) has been pushing back against Trump’s characterisation of the city she leads, pointing out on MSNBC that crime rates have been dropping.
In DC, violent crime is down by 26% compared with this time in 2024, according to DC police data. Homicides are down by 12%.
DC police have made about 900 juvenile arrests this year - almost 20% fewer than during the same time frame last year. About 200 of those charges are for violent crimes and at least four dozen are for carjacking.
“If the priority is to show force in an American city, we know he can do that here,” Bowser, who said she last spoke to Trump a few weeks ago, said on MSNBC. “But it won’t be because there’s a spike in crime.”
The reassignment of FBI agents has further demoralised some agents in the Washington field office, who believe they have little expertise or training in thwarting carjackers and were already angered by a spate of firings inside the agency that they deemed were unwarranted.
Last week, the Trump Administration ousted with no explanation FBI personnel across the country, including the head of the Washington field office.
In 2020, the first Trump Administration dispatched FBI agents, mostly from the Washington field office, to respond to the racial justice protests that June in the city.
The Trump Administration had wanted a federal presence in the streets as a deterrent to rioters or protesters who might try to vandalise federal property.
Several agents were captured in a photograph taking a knee in what was viewed as a gesture of solidarity to protesters marching against racial injustice - an image that went viral and fuelled accusations from conservatives that the bureau harbours a liberal agenda.
People familiar with the FBI have said agents are not trained for riot control and were placed in an untenable position as they knelt down, trying to defuse a tense situation.
In the first months of the current Trump Administration, officials reassigned several of those agents who were captured in that photo from nearly five years ago.
“If DC doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore,” Trump wrote on social media last week in a post that included a bloody image of the injured former Doge staffer.
This northern spring, Trump ordered the creation of the “DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force”, a vehicle for his long-held fixations on quality-of-life issues in the city, including homeless encampments and graffiti.
Today, homeless advocates and DC residents criticised Trump’s threats to remove homeless people from DC as inhumane, costly, and impractical.
“That money could be better spent getting folks housing and support” Jesse Rabinowitz, campaign and communications director at the National Homelessness Law Centre, said of the federal law enforcement presence in the district.
Deborah Goosby, a 67-year-old homeless woman, sat in her usual spot greeting shoppers outside a DC grocery store.
“That’s never going to happen,” she said after hearing that Trump wanted to send people experiencing homelessness far from the nation’s capital. “They can’t make me leave.”