Trump to Deploy Federal Agents to D.C. amid Crime Spike

The nation’s capital city has become a hotbed for violent crime in recent years. Although city and federal officials have moved to curb the rise in murders, assaults, carjackings, and other offenses over the past two years, President Trump is taking more decisive and immediate action. According to multiple reports, the president has authorized federal law enforcement to patrol the streets of Washington, D.C. and may even send in the National Guard.

“Washington, D.C. is an amazing city, but it has sadly been plagued by violent crime for far too long. President Trump has directed an increased presence of federal law enforcement to protect innocent citizens,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement shared with media outlets. As of Thursday night, she said, “[T]here will be no safe harbor for violent criminals in D.C.”

U.S. Park Police will lead the federal policing initiative, assisted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA); Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF); and even Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. National Guard units have also been seen increasing in number around the D.C. Armory, according to several reports. The federal crackdown is expected to last a week.

Earlier this week, the president threatened to take federal control of D.C. in response to violent crime. The announcement came after 19-year-old U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employee Edward Coristine was viciously beaten by at least eight individuals who were attempting to carjack a woman when he intervened to defend her. “If D.C. 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 warned. Multiple reports have stated that Coristine’s attackers were all or mostly minors, with some as young as 14 years old. The president said that minors involved in crime know “that they will be almost immediately released. They are not afraid of Law Enforcement because they know nothing ever happens to them…” He called on lawmakers to change the law in order “to prosecute these ‘minors’ as adults, and lock them up for a long time, starting at age 14.”

The new U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who also functions as Washington’s prosecutor, former New York judge Jeanine Pirro, said in a Wednesday night interview that the age of responsibility in D.C. needs to be lowered to 14 so that minors can be prosecuted as adults for committing violent crimes. “If you’re 14, 15, 16, or 17 years old, you get coddled, as you do in most American Democrat cities,” Pirro said. She noted, “None of them come to my office … because they’re not considered criminals. They go to family court, where the effort is rehabilitation.” Referring to the D.C. City Council, Pirro emphasized, “The president is right; they’ve got to stop their coddling. Number one, we’ve got to lower the age of responsibility to 14. I’m tired of having these kids commit crimes in their crews and gangs in D.C.”

“The council has this Youth Incarceration Act where we had a guy who shot a kid on a bus, not justified, with an illegal gun. You know what the sentence was? Probation. The judge said, ‘Go to college,’” Pirro recounted. She continued, “He took an illegal gun — he should be jailed for the illegal gun. Forget about the shooting — you put that on top of the gun. Then what we’ve got are kids who are out there, who are making fun of all of this, doing carjackings, and I can’t touch them because they want to protect that.” The prosecutor further noted that adult gang members will often recruit minors into their gangs in order to carry out the gang’s “dirty work” without facing serious penalties.

“Youth violence is on the rise, not just in D.C., but across the country,” Pirro pointed out. “And if you think that these kids need to be coddled and they need to be hugged — they need to have consequences,” she stressed. She continued, “They need to understand that enough is enough, that we’re going to put them in jail or some kind of youth rehabilitation detention facility and not allow the D.C. Council … to take cover for these kids. It’s time to end it.” Pirro added, “That’s what the president wants. That’s what we’re going to do.”

According to statistics compiled by D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), nearly 60% of carjackings in the nation’s capital are committed by minors. Since August of 2023, 56% of the over 330 individuals arrested for carjackings have been under the age of 18, most of them aged 15 or 16. Some were as young as 12. Carjackings have increased by 72% during the same period, while the rate of theft of unmanned vehicles has remained practically unchanged.

Violent crime reached a two-decade high in 2023 under Matthew Graves, then-President Joe Biden’s U.S. Attorney for D.C., who let nearly 70% of crimes go unprosecuted. In response to public backlash, Graves increased the number of prosecutions, and MPD data suggested that 2024 saw crime in the capital fall to a 30-year-low. In May, however, MPD Commander Michael Pulliam was placed on administrative leave after being accused of manipulating statistics to make the crime rate appear lower than it actually is. According to the D.C. Police Union, MPD leadership more broadly have been classifying violent crimes as less violent offenses to ensure that the violent crimes are not reported in either the MPD’s or the FBI’s statistics, artificially lowering the reported violent crime rate for the nation’s capital.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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