President Donald Trump announced plans to wrest control of the Metropolitan Police Department and said he will dispatch 800 D.C. National Guard troops to patrol the city’s streets.

In a press conference Monday, the president — flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and other administration officials — claimed the moves were necessary with Washington overrun by “bloodthirsty criminals” and “roving mobs of wild youth.”

Data shows violent crime is falling, not rising, in D.C. The city’s Metropolitan Police Department reported a 30-year low in 2024 with rates dropping by an additional 26% in early 2025, and homicides down 12% year-over-year.

A White House official said the takeover is supposed to last for 30 days. White House staff secretary Will Scharf said the president signed two executive orders Monday morning, the first using a section of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act to place the city’s police department under federal control, and the second allowing Hegseth to deploy the National Guard.

Trump and the secretary said the military will be called in “if needed.”

Local officials disputed the president’s characterization of crime in Washington and objected to his takeover of policing in the city. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb called Trump’s actions “unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful,” pledging to “do what’s necessary to protect the rights and safety of District residents.”

During an interview on MSNBC Sunday, D.C Mayor Muriel Bowser said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s claims that the nation’s capital was “more violent than Baghdad” were “hyperbolic and false.”

“We’re going to keep talking to the president, working with his people on the issues that are high priority for him,” Bowser said. “Now, if the priority is to show force in an American city, we know he can do that here. But it won’t be because there’s a spike in crime.”

At the same time, the mayor acknowledged that there was a spike in crime in 2023, when D.C. recorded its highest homicide total in more than two decades and saw significant increases in carjackings and other offenses. The city has continued to grapple with youth-involved crimes, particularly armed robberies and car thefts committed by teenagers.

The District’s LGBTQ residents are protected from discrimination under the tenets of the D.C. Human Rights Act, and from bias in the criminal justice system through the Metropolitan Police Department’s LGBT Liaison Unit.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt did not immediately return a request for comment on whether the administration is considering any action that would affect the law or MPD’s LGBTLU, but the Washington Blade will update this story if a statement is provided.

Cesar Toledo, executive director of the Wanda Alston Foundation, which provides housing services for homeless LGBTQ youth, told the Blade, “I’m definitely concerned about the future for the LGBTQ+ community here in the District.”

“Overall, we’ve been seeing an unprecedented scale of attacks on the community from the federal government,” Toledo said. “So, an overtake of the District of Columbia, which has long been a safe haven for members of our community, is definitely concerning.” 

“This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re going to take our capital back,” Trump said, adding that the National Guard and law enforcement are “going to be allowed to do their job properly.”

Criminals “love to spit in the face of the police as the police are standing up there in uniform,” he said. “They’re standing and they’re screaming at him an inch away from their face, and then they start spitting in their face. And I said, ‘You tell them, you spit and we hit.’ And they can hit real hard.”

“This dire public safety crisis stems directly from the abject failures of the city’s local leadership,” the president said later during the press conference. “The radical left City Council adopted no cash bail, which has been a ‘disaster’ in ‘every place in the country’ that has enacted such a policy."

“We’re going to change the statute,” Trump promised, adding that he had spoken with Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche about getting Congressional Republicans to vote in favor of re-instituting cash bail in Washington.

The effort “probably won’t get one Democrat vote, because they have no idea what they’re doing,” the president added. “That’s why they want men playing in women’s sports. That’s why they want transgender for everybody, everybody transgender, and they just got walloped in an election, in a landslide, and they haven’t changed.”

He continued, “One thing I saw the other day, a certain gentleman who is a very well known politician, a Democrat, was fighting like hell that men should be allowed to play in women’s sports. They just don’t get it. They said it’s an 80-20 issue, and I think it’s a 97-to-three issue. And I don’t know who the three are. I’ve never heard anybody come — nobody’s ever come up to me, ‘sir, you have to let men play in women’s sports. You have to do it, sir.’ Nobody’s ever approached me. I don’t know where this issue even comes from.”

Washington Blade courtesy of the National LGBTQ Media Association.