Who Will "Dominate the Streets" in 2029? Notes From Occupied D.C.

On June 1st, 2020, the fourth consecutive day of protests in Washington, D.C., following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN, President Trump left the White House and walked through Lafayette Square Park for a photo op. In advance of his stroll, U.S. Park Police and National Guard troops deployed tear gas and violently cleared protesters from the park.[1] The resulting picture of Trump cynically holding a Bible in front of the parish house of St. John’s Episcopal Church outraged many, including Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, who condemned the stunt, saying, “I was outraged that he felt that he had the license to do that, and that he would abuse our sacred symbols and our sacred space in that way.”[2]

Before leaving the White House for the photo op, President Trump and then-Attorney General Bill Barr addressed the media and called on America’s governors and police to “dominate the streets” in response to the 2020 uprisings.[3] Trump accused governors of being too slow to sic the National Guard on protesters, while Barr scrambled to deploy federal Bureau of Prisons officers as riot police to Miami and D.C. They delivered these comments to the media four days after protesters in Minneapolis had set fire to the city’s third police precinct building.[4] By the end of the week, 34 states and D.C. had deployed nearly 100,000 National Guard troops in response to the protests, which were still raging across the country.[5]

The regime’s experiences over the course of the first Trump term must be considered as we investigate developments from the second Trump administration. The massive funding increase for ICE in the Secure America Act is transforming ICE into an ideologically driven federal police force at the president’s direct disposal.[6] The ongoing occupation of D.C. by federal police and the seemingly permanent deployment of National Guard troops to the city should also be read through this lens.

Protesting the new presidents

As the seat of the United States government, D.C. is a site of near-constant political protest. Since Trump announced his first presidential campaign in 2015, protests around a president assuming office have increased in scope and intensity. Trump’s first inauguration in 2017 was met with mass protests in D.C. and around the country. The trend continued in 2021, when right-wing protesters broke into the Capitol building as the Trump faithful sought to disrupt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. While similar protests in 2025 were less intense than what we saw in 2017 and 2021, they should not be read as a reversal of the overall trend. Even if Trump himself does follow through on attempting to circumvent his term limit and run again, the political tensions of the Trump era remain unresolved, and it seems likely that if 2029 is an ending, things will not end quietly.[7]

Protests erupted in D.C. and across the country, spanning multiple days, when Trump first took office on January 20th, 2017. Now remembered on the left as the J20 protests, large rallies and marches in D.C. were accompanied by the targeted disruption of inauguration events and by black bloc tactics.[8] The police rioted, attacking protesters and performing mass sweeps. More than 200 demonstrators were arrested, many kettled and brutalized without any warning. In 2021, D.C. settled a class action lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of many of the protesters arrested at the inauguration protests in 2017.[9]

In January 2021, as Congress met to confirm the results of the presidential election, amidst what could be reasonably interpreted as a poorly thought-out coup attempt by President Trump, right-wing protesters descended on the nation’s capital for a Trump rally on the Ellipse. Trump delivered a speech in which he continued his claims that the election had been “stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats” and “the fake news media,” telling rally attendees that “we will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.”[10] The pro-Trump mob left the rally on the Ellipse and stormed the Capitol building. Of course there were no National Guard troops or armies of police in riot gear deployed in advance of the right-wing mob’s arrival; that is not who those forces are for.

Trump’s second inauguration in 2025 was also met with protests, but nothing matching the impact and intensity that surrounded the previous two transfers of presidential power. Radical energy that, under different conditions, may have been directed towards mass action around the inauguration had been, correctly, directed for two years into efforts to resist the genocide in occupied Palestine—a genocide which the U.S. and Israel are perpetrating. The absence of a democratic process, accessible to the masses, to nominate the Democratic Party’s 2024 candidate for president also contributed to a lower-energy response.

Open presidential primaries for both parties are coming up in 2028. If the left-populist moment continues through the 2028 election, and if the Trump administration tries a second iteration of the antidemocratic maneuvers they attempted at the end of the first Trump term, conditions could be ripe for another escalation around the inauguration in 2029.

The nation’s capital is an important site for mass protest and for struggle between the people and the State. While the left takes its lessons from the 2020 uprisings, the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, and a decade of action around presidential inaugurations, the Trump administration takes its own lessons from the same events. We must keep this context in mind as we consider the situation one year into the federal occupation on the streets of Washington, D.C., and as we look forward to 2029.

A year of occupation in D.C.

It has been a little over a year since the Trump administration formally declared a ‘crime emergency’ in Washington, D.C. D.C. is not a state, has no governor or congressional representation, and is managed by the federal government. With limited home rule extended to the city government by an act of Congress, the city is serving as a testing ground for the Trump administration’s approach to policing.

Trump’s new approach to D.C. did not start with the emergency declaration. On March 28, 2025, Trump issued an executive order creating the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force.[11] Even before Trump got involved, D.C. had the most police per capita among major U.S. cities. In a city traditionally overpoliced by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), the United States Capitol Police, the Metro Transit Police Department (MTPD), and the United States Park Police, along with a minor presence from every federal agency that has its own police department, Trump’s Safe and Beautiful Task Force brings together 20 federal agencies, accountable to the executive, and charged with coordinating with the MPD, MTPD, district government, and other local and federal agencies and officials. D.C.’s current mayor, Muriel Bowser, has generally cooperated with the administration and has argued that doing so is the only way to preserve the limited autonomy granted to D.C. via home rule.[12] Autonomy in name only may work well for the mayor while her name is on the office, but for residents of the district it is no autonomy at all.

Trump’s D.C. ‘crime emergency’ declaration came down on August 11, 2025, taking federal control of the MPD for 30 days by invoking section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act.[13] The emergency declaration was nominally precipitated by the attempted carjacking and beating of DOGE employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine in the Logan Circle neighborhood of D.C.[14] Coinciding with the emergency declaration, the National Guard was also deployed to D.C. from multiple states. During the initial surge, conservative governors were tripping over each other to win the president’s favor by volunteering to deploy their National Guard troops to the nation’s capital. Despite the expiration of the emergency declaration after 30 days, the National Guard is still deployed to the streets of D.C.

The Safe and Beautiful Task Force consists of an alphabet soup of police officers from various federal agencies, coordinating with the D.C. government and the MPD both in back-office duties and on the streets of the city. Aligned with the administration's priorities, the task force is engaged in immigration enforcement activities. During the emergency period, active patrols of federal agents were deployed to immigrant communities throughout the city. Immigration enforcement traffic checkpoints also began popping up on district roads. District residents responded actively to these highly visible shows of force, but after the emergency period expired and in the face of backlash from district residents, the task force shifted tactics from high-visibility interventions to patrolling more discreetly.[15]

District residents often encounter the task force in their daily lives as patrols of 2-3 unmarked cars full of armed and often masked federal agents, traveling in a caravan with uniformed MPD officers in a marked vehicle. These caravans conduct proactive patrols that seem to largely be focused on nuisance crimes, harassing and arresting D.C. residents for holding open containers, smoking weed in public, or simply being unhoused. It has become common to see a dozen or more police and federal agents suddenly spilling onto the street from one of these caravans while out in the city.

D.C. passed a sanctuary city amendment in 2020, but the MPD has been circumventing the will of the people by using loopholes in the city's laws and policies.[16] MPD is not permitted to release detainees from MPD custody into the custody of a federal immigration agency and is prohibited from sharing most information about a detainee with federal immigration agencies. When pressed by the D.C. Council, D.C.’s interim police chief insisted that MPD does not work with ICE, but confirmed that other federal agencies in the task force are conducting civil immigration enforcement.[17] Working with the Safe and Beautiful task force, MPD will allow federal agents to look over their shoulder while they collect information and review paperwork from people they’ve stopped. The federal agents plug the information they saw or overheard into their own systems and will then intervene in the situation on their own terms with no regard for D.C.’s policies on the rights of immigrants.

Federal agents and U.S. Park Police officers from the task force now regularly engage in deadly car chases, though these chases had been banned in D.C. before Trump’s intervention.[18] Federal agents engaged with the task force have thrown flash-bang grenades and shot at people during traffic stops.[19][20] After a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agent shot at Phillip Brown during a stop in October 2025, an MPD officer involved in the incident testified that he had been instructed to omit the shooting from his report.[21] Then-police chief Pamela Smith denied that there was a cover-up.[22] Neither the federal agents nor the National Guard troops have done much to influence violent crime statistics as compared to trends from before the occupation.[23]

The National Guard troops deployed to D.C. in support of Trump’s Safe and Beautiful Task Force quickly shifted from picking up trash on the National Mall to ‘presence patrols’ throughout the city. While the Guard deployment was initially unarmed, Trump armed the Guards early in their deployment.[24] This did not prevent two Guard members from being shot in November 2025, and recently a Guardsman was arrested for pointing his gun at another Guard member during an argument about hairstyles.[25][26] Recent reports out of D.C. indicate that despite having no police powers, the National Guard patrols have begun assaulting and detaining D.C. residents.[27] Despite all of this, one of the most common complaints about the Guard deployment is that they do not really do much of anything.

The Guard deployment is perceived as an immense waste of public resources, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. In D.C. today, you see Guardsmen in groups of three, loitering in metro stations, or plodding through tourist areas and commercial corridors on foot. While federal agents and the MPD in the Safe and Beautiful task force have been harassing district residents and prosecuting the president’s vile deportation agenda, the Guard deployment appears to primarily be about being visible, reminding district residents of the limits of the city’s autonomy, and generally getting people accustomed to the permanent presence of armed troops in the city.

Looking forward to 2029

Despite being empowered to end the collaboration with the stroke of a pen, Mayor Bowser has committed to a strategy of appeasement in her relationship with the Trump administration. Incoming socialist Mayor Janeese Lewis George will need to break with the Trump administration on day one and end the collaboration between the D.C. government and the federal occupation. The people who cast their ballots for a mayor who will fight for D.C. deserve nothing less.

The Trump administration has been meddling in D.C. since his first term. While less effective during their first term, they have learned from the experience and have vastly improved their ability to interfere in D.C. during their second term in office. They are not going to leave D.C. alone when the city has an openly socialist mayor, and during a national upsurge of left-populist energy that sees this administration as its enemy. Preemptively compromising in an attempt to maneuver for a program of either deliverism or ‘sewer socialism’ would already be the wrong approach for this political moment, even if you don’t consider the challenges presented by the federal government’s ability to meddle in D.C.’s budget in combination with the disruption to the city’s tax base caused by Trump’s DOGE layoffs of federal workers. Whatever you may think of the compromises Zohran has made with Kathy Hochul and other Democratic leaders in pursuit of advancing his deliverist agenda, Janeese making similar compromises with the Trump administration would be intolerable.

The Trump administration has taken lessons from their experiences with mass protest. Trump is deploying and maintaining a federal police and military presence in D.C. in advance of future popular unrest. Whether you think Trump is preparing a new antidemocratic maneuver around the 2028 election that could require a People’s January 6th in response, or you just see more hot summers coming up on the horizon, you should not let it escape your notice that Trump has extended the National Guard deployment in D.C. through the end of his term in January 2029.[28]

The purpose behind ‘wasting’ billions of dollars on the Guard deployment and the Safe and Beautiful Task Force in D.C. becomes clear when you consider it in light of Trump and Barr’s speeches to the media during the 2020 uprisings. In 2020, Trump was berating governors for not deploying their National Guard troops against protesters, and Barr was scrambling to deploy federal Bureau of Prisons officers as riot police at protests in D.C. and Miami. Today, federal police and National Guard troops have become a permanent fixture on the streets of D.C., already waiting to meet the next mass uprising with reactionary violence. The Trump administration is getting ready to “dominate the streets”.

D.C. statehood, equal rights, and full suffrage for the people of D.C. need to be part of the Democratic Revolution. If the Democrats hold a majority in the legislature after the midterms, they will also need to find ways to fight against Trump’s occupation of D.C., defend D.C.’s home rule, and fight for D.C. statehood. The nation’s capital is an important site in the struggle for democracy in America. D.C. needs support to get Trump’s federal agents and National Guard troops out before the next time the people need to dominate the streets of our nation’s capital.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/867532070/trumps-unannounced-church-visit-angers-church-officials

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/02/867705160/he-did-not-pray-fallout-grows-from-trump-s-photo-op-at-st-john-s-church

[3] https://abcnews.com/Politics/trump-barr-governors-dominate-streets-response-unrest/story?id=70994362

[4] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/protestors-set-fire-to-minneapolis-police-precinct-as-trump-attacks-uprising-on-twitter

[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20211023075855/https://www.nationalguard.mil/Resources/Press-Releases/Article/2213005/national-guard-response-to-civil-unrest/

[6] https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/whats-in-the-secure-america-act/

[7] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-still-suggests-he-may-seek-a-3rd-term-but-hes-now-talking-more-about-post-presidency-life

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/20/inauguration-protesters-police-washington-dc

[9] https://www.acludc.org/press-releases/dc-pay-16-million-settle-claims-2017-inauguration-day-demonstrations/

[10] https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial

[11] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/making-the-district-of-columbia-safe-and-beautiful/

[12] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/11/13/bowser-trump-negotiations-dc-takeover/