Democrats in Congress denounced the 30-day mobilization inside the capital, which Trump previewed during the 2024 election, as an “unjustified power grab” and vowed to block an extension. The city’s elected attorney general called it an “unlawful” abuse of emergency powers to lower crime rates that the administration itself said had fallen.

President Donald Trump announced Monday that he was placing the D.C. police under direct federal control and will deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington to fight crime, an extraordinary flex of federal power that stripped city leadership of its ability to make law enforcement decisions and could expose residents of the nation’s capital to unpredictable encounters with a domestically deployed military force.