On August 11, 2025, President Donald Trump announced the deployment of National Guard troops in the United States’s capital, Washington D.C. The deployment came as part of Trump’s plan to combat both crime-related and homelessness across the capital, in which he planned to mobilize roughly 800 D.C. National Guard troops for said problems. “This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re going to take our capital back. We’re going to take it back,” Trump declared during the news conference in which he deployed the National Guard.
Trump additionally set the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPDC) under federal control with the U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who will primarily supervise the police force while under control.
Residents of D.C. met Trump’s decision with backlash, taking to the streets just days following his announcement. Protesters defied the controlling of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and the deployment of the National Guard by marching down the capital with signs that read ‘Shame’ and ‘Trump must go now!’. Organizations including Refuse Fascism orchestrated such protests. Sam Goldman, a spokesperson for Refuse Fascism openly disagrees with Trump’s attempt at controlling D.C., “Millions and millions in our bones hate everything that Trump and MAGA represent, everything they’ve done and everything they’re doing,” Goldman voiced in an interview with NPR.
Although Trump named crime as the driving point for his actions, statistics disprove the seriousness of crime in D.C. According to data from the MPDC, crime rates reached their lowest point in 30 years in 2024 after they reached a concerningly high point the year before (2023). Since crime rates lowered in 2024, it continued to decline steadily until 2025. In an interview with MSNBC, the Mayor of D.C., Muriel Bowser, suggested that Trump exaggerated crime problems, “We are not experiencing a spike in crime. In fact, we’re watching our crime numbers go down.”
Retaliation from D.C. residents sparked involvement from states including West Virginia, South Carolina, and Ohio, which reinforced Trump’s efforts to control the capital by deploying National Guard troops of their own, deploying a combined total of 750 extra troops to the capital.
After outside states began deploying their own troops, National Guard involvement started bleeding into places outside D.C. On Tuesday, September 2, Trump announced that he would deploy National Guard troops in Chicago, which faced immediate backlash from the Chicago Mayor, Brandon Johnson. In an interview with reporters, Johnson spoke, “He just wants his own police force that will do publicity stunts whenever his poll numbers are sinking…whenever he needs another distraction from his failures.”
The same day as Trump’s announcement to take action on Chicago, he attempted to resolve crime in California in the same fashion, but Federal Judge Charles Breyer retaliated and blocked his administration from sending troops into California. Trump failed to announce specifically when he would send troops to Chicago, but he announced that he would eventually. “We’re going in. I didn’t say when, but we’re going in,” Trump declared to White House reporters in regards to his involvement in Chicago.
Trump continues to involve military force across the U.S., and he will continue to use them as the solution towards crime-related issues.
