Trump Expected to Order a Crackdown on D.C. Crime, Homeless Encampments

By Spencer S. Hsu and Emily Davies / The Washington Post

13:29 JST, February 11, 2025

President Donald Trump is expected to issue an executive order that would seek to ratchet up penalties and enforcement of violent and petty crimes, clear homeless camps, and clean graffiti in the District of Columbia, according to three people briefed on the matter.

The directives targeting a city Trump has often vilified could come in an executive order as early as this week and emphasize public safety and beautification of Washington, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private conversations between the White House and the administration of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D).

Details of the executive order may shift, but early drafts have included language that would order homeless encampments cleared, direct prosecutors to pursue tougher penalties for gun violence as well as petty crime such as public urination, and revive one of Trump’s 2020 executive orders to protect national monuments, the people said. The order is also expected to focus broadly on federal parks controlled by the National Park Service.

Trump has long derided D.C. as a haven of crime, even though violence has decreased in the past year, and some in the city are likely to view the executive action as furthering a political attack on a deep-blue urban center. Local officials, too, fear the president might threaten D.C.’s self-governance, over which he and the Republican-controlled Congress have significant power.

The president has threatened to “take over” the city, and two Republicans in Congress recently proposed legislation that would take authority from the D.C. government. The bills would largely roll back the city’s right to make decisions independently as long as it does not violate state or federal law, which is known as “home rule.”

But on some issues of criminal justice, Trump is aligned with Bowser, who has advocated for more aggressive approaches to crime in recent years in response to spikes in killings and carjackings. The two could find common ground, particularly if Trump offers federal resources to beef up law enforcement in the District.

“It’s hard to argue with the Park Service doing more to help the city,” said D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) in an interview Monday. “Although the federal government needs to follow that up with resources that the Park Service would need.”

Homicides in the District fell about 30 percent in 2024, part of an across-the-board dip in crime that has left levels of robberies and armed assaults at or below levels in Trump’s first term. Killings dropped to levels more on par with other cities across the country after spiking in 2023, though they remained below numbers of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the District was dubbed the nation’s murder capital because of bloodshed fueled by the crack epidemic.

Still, violent crime is a persistent concern of D.C. residents, and D.C. officials fear that one high-profile shooting could unravel any progress on the perception of safety in the city. On Monday evening, a man was shot around Union Station before the evening commute.

“We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation in Washington, D.C., and clean it up, renovate it and rebuild our capital city so there is no longer a nightmare of murder and crime,” Trump said in a campaign speech last summer.

The city and the Trump administration are also bracing for the public safety impacts of the full-time return of tens of thousands of federal workers to downtown offices in two weeks, as well as the effects of other sweeping moves by the White House. Those include plans to push up to 100,000 federal workers out of the Washington area; firing dozens of prosecutors responsible for public safety who investigated Trump and the Capitol riot; and moving to purge associated ranks of the FBI, many of them based in Washington.

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced separately last week that the Justice Department is investigating whether resources spent on Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot investigations came at the expense of the safety of D.C. residents.

The White House, Bowser and interim D.C. U.S. attorney Edward R. Martin Jr., through spokespeople, declined to comment Monday.

Bowser, in conversations with White House officials, has discussed the drop in crime and her interest in making cosmetic improvements to the District, seeing her best path forward as finding shared interests with the president, according to two people familiar with her conversations. She traveled to Mar-a-Lago in December to meet with Trump, and left Florida saying, “President Trump and I both want Washington, D.C., to be the best, most beautiful city in the world and we want the capital city to reflect the strength of our nation.”

The tone is a marked contrast from her posture during Trump’s first term, when she resisted Trump’s push to stage military tanks at his July Fourth speech at the Lincoln Memorial and stood defiant on her freshly painted “Black Lives Matter” plaza, just two blocks from the White House. The strategy will be pressure tested in the fine print of the final executive order – which could add resources to the nation’s capital or strip its agency.

“We will make DC safe and especially focus on the problem of criminals with guns,” Martin told staff in an email Wednesday afternoon, after visiting the Frederick Douglass House in Southeast Washington and meeting with judges at the federal district court in D.C. a day earlier.

Lowering crime and clearing homeless encampments would contribute to what Trump has long envisioned as a “spectacular” commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of America’s Declaration of Independence, which is next year. Just as President Richard M. Nixon while president championed a year-long celebration of the 1976 bicentennial to heal national divisions after the Vietnam War, Trump is embracing the 2026 “semiquincentennial” as a moment to promote American greatness and patriotism – and present himself as a unifying rather than polarizing figure.

Trump signed a White House executive order in January resuscitating abandoned ideas from his first term, including a new planning “Task Force 250,” a “National Garden of American Heroes” in Washington, and harsher punishments for vandalizing or destroying existing statues and monuments.

The administration has also pushed to shed government buildings in D.C., potentially offering the city a chance to move valuable real estate onto the tax rolls and redevelop areas such as southwest Washington south of the National Mall into new neighborhoods with homes, retail businesses, parks and plazas.

Martin has said U.S. prosecutors would turn from pardoned riot participants and police civil rights abuses to tougher penalties for gun offenders. He has privately pledged to push a GOP-led Senate to confirm judges to fill crippling vacancies in D.C. Superior Court and signaled he will redeploy prosecutors to focus on street crime and local offenses, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plans publicly.

Prosecutors during Trump’s first term targeted felons caught illegally possessing firearms by charging such cases under federal statutes in U.S. District Court rather than with local offenses in D.C. Superior Court. Mandatory minimum sentences and pretrial detention are far more common in federal cases and are more consistently applied.

Prosecutors scaled back the effort after acknowledging that it targeted three predominantly Black wards and was not enforced citywide as announced. Federal gun prosecutions in D.C. remain higher than in 2018. But the impact on crime has been hard to discern amid wider trends.

One challenge immediately facing any crime crackdown is staff cuts. Hiring and promotions for the U.S. attorney’s office have been frozen. Martin, an organizer with Trump’s post-2020-election “Stop the Steal” effort, also has upended his office with reviews of riot prosecutions, and the firing of Jan. 6 prosecutors who were still on probationary status after being converted to full-time from shorter-term positions after Election Day.

While people close to Martin initially placed the number of terminations at about 30, and the office declined to comment on personnel matters, some of the affected prosecutors, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation, say they have identified 17 people who were cut. That is about five percent of the roughly 350-prosecutor office – including several starting misdemeanor “boot camp” in a shorthanded D.C. Superior Court division – creating a domino effect as vacancies require backfilling, according to those in the office.

“If you get rid of those people, there’s no one to replace them. That’s a lot of cases you’re not going to be able to bring in Superior Court,” a former government official familiar with the office said. “It’s hollowing out and creating a generational hole whose knock-on effects will be felt for months or years, depending on how long the hiring freeze lasts.”

Mendelson said he is most concerned about the focus on tougher prosecution while there are widespread judicial vacancies in D.C. courts that have created significant backlogs.

“It would be really helpful if the White House were to get the nominations over to the Senate and then push the Senate to confirm them,” he said.