DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, an elected Democrat, reversed her tone in the direction of President Trump’s mobilization of the Nationwide Guard to fight crime in her metropolis, calling for residents to guard their metropolis and its autonomy.
Bowser’s 180-degree place change got here hours after she appeared to help Trump’s actions to safeguard the crime-plagued capital as she stumped for her celebration within the 2026 election.
“It is a time the place group wants to leap in and all of us have to do what we will in our house, in our lane, to guard our metropolis and to guard our autonomy, to guard our House Rule, and get to the opposite facet of this man, and ensure we elect a Democratic Home in order that we now have a backstop to this authoritarian push,” Bowser stated at a city corridor Tuesday, in keeping with CNN.
Bowser, 53, had initially welcomed the Nationwide Guard deployment underneath the president’s Title 32 authority, saying she would work cooperatively with the Trump administration.
“He’s excited about being in neighborhoods, preventing crime in neighborhoods,” she informed MSNBC’s “The Weekend,” forward of Trump’s announcement.
The three-term mayor informed reporters Tuesday she needed to see “ make the a lot of the extra officer help.”
Below Trump’s order, the Metropolitan Police Division can be supplemented by personnel from a number of federal businesses, together with the Border Patrol, the FBI, the DEA and US Park Police.
Bowser later argued that almost all of the extra federal brokers’ patrol radius can be restricted to federal property, just like the Nationwide Mall.
“My expectation, although it might change, is that they’ll deploy the Guard on federal properties — that features parks, monuments, federal buildings,” Bowser stated in a dialog with group leaders Tuesday evening, posted on X.
Nationwide Guard members arrived on the streets of DC on Tuesday afternoon as footage captured Humvees lined up on the facet of a street close to the Washington Monument.
Solely a small fraction of the 800 Nationwide Guard members anticipated to participate within the crime crackdown mission had been mobilized as of Tuesday afternoon, with extra anticipated to deploy within the coming days, a Division of Protection official informed the Washington Submit.
Trump federalized the DC Metropolitan Police Division’s 3,400-officer power and activated the DC Nationwide Guard on Monday, simply hours after he directed some 850 federal brokers to patrol the streets of the capital as a part of a sweeping effort to drive down crime within the district.
DC had the fourth-highest murder price amongst US cities in 2024, in keeping with statistics compiled by the Heart for Public Security Initiatives at Rochester Institute of Expertise, with 27.3 murders per 100,000 individuals.
That’s six instances greater than New York Metropolis’s price that yr, which reached 4.7 homicides per 100,000 residents — and 4 instances greater than the 7.2 homicides per 100,000 individuals on the identical per capita price in Los Angeles.
