WASHINGTON—President Trump’s troops now patrolling the nation’s Capital—and helping his ICE agents illegally kidnap people—are only the tip of the despotic chief executive’s D.C. iceberg, an examination of his edicts shows.
FreeDC, a longtime coalition that lobbies for statehood and full congressional representation for the capital’s 710.000 people, is among organizations fighting back with a toolkit of resistance measures. Also involved are civil rights, civic and equal rights groups nationwide.
The message coming from here: Our cause is your cause. Left unsaid—but not by Trump himself—you, in Chicago, in Baltimore, in New York, could be next.
Indeed, buried deep in one of Trump’s executive orders is a mandate to his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, to “ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.”
And Hegseth “shall immediately begin ensuring each state’s Army National Guard and Air National Guard are resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist federal, state, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate,” Trump said.
Against all this, FreeDC, which the CPUSA’s D.C. chapter is working with and is a member of, is laying the groundwork for fighting back.
Keep each other safe
“We need to do two things right now D.C.: Keep each other safe, and actively work to end the takeover,” it declares. It’s distributing “Know your rights” cards, in English and Spanish, to area residents, plus a toolkit for schools and students to use when encountering ICE agents. Among its other recommendations:
- Go outside every night at 8 p.m. and set up a racket of banging pots and pans—and keep doing so until D.C. is liberated from Trump’s troops. Such pot-banging was, in past years, a common form of popular protest against totalitarian regimes worldwide.
- Support D.C. school kids, and the workers, too, actively. Latinos are a large share of both the student population and the D.C. public schools’ support staff, such as school nurses, cafeteria workers and sanitation engineers.
“In March, ICE agents tried to kidnap a D.C. school nurse on her way to work one morning. Putting school nurses into ICE detention won’t make D.C. communities safer,” FreeDC explained.
“We’re calling on all school communities to have morning and afternoon school support teams to support safe arrival and dismissal for all students,” it said. It might want to include staffers, too.
- Adults can enlist friends and relatives from outside D.C., especially in Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, South Carolina and Ohio, to pressure their Republican governors to withdraw National Guard members sent to patrol D.C.
- “As Black and Brown D.C. residents, we know we are safer when we go together. Right now is a time to always travel with a partner, and to have each other’s backs. Take the We Go Together pledge with our partner Harriet’s Wildest Dreams.”
- The D.C. Metropolitan Police Department established four “youth curfew zones where young people will be subject to increased enforcement and potential arrest,” FreeDC warns.
“These danger zones will put more D.C. children at risk of being violently arrested and detained by Trump’s terror squads. We are calling on D.C. neighbors to Adopt A Curfew Zone and help keep young people safe each night.”
Trump’s militaristic message and D.C. repression is resonating and creating resistance elsewhere, especially in Illinois. Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a caustic Trump critic, called Trump “a wannabe dictator” who wants to turn Chicago neighborhoods “into a war zone.”
“We made no requests for military intervention—none. Donald Trump wants to use his military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents and score political points,” Pritzker said in an outdoor speech.
National Guards in Humvees
But back to D.C. There, hundreds of National Guards in Humvees from right-wing controlled “red states” such as West Virginia, Mississippi and South Carolina and Ohio joined D.C. police in patrolling the streets. They left the roundups and use of force to ICE.
The Guard members and their rifles and machine guns provide cover—and potential muscle—for Trump’s ICE agents’ indiscriminate kidnapping of people off the streets, from cars, restaurants and even schools.
And those are just the physical manifestations of Trump’s repression of the nation’s Capital. He’s also issued executive orders designed to drastically reinforce the little-known fact—outside D.C., that the capital’s residents are second-class citizens. Among Trump’s edicts:
- A ban on cashless bail, which Trump instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to extend nationwide. In an order rife with dog whistles, Trump said he’s imposing that mandate for public safety.
“Our great law enforcement officers risk their lives to arrest potentially violent criminals, only to be forced to arrest the same individuals, sometimes for the same crimes, while they await trial,” he huffed. Any jurisdiction that defies Trump and continues cashless bail shall have all federal aid cut off.
- Ending “unwarranted pretrial release” of “criminal defendants who are a threat to public safety.” Trump named “rape, murder, carjacking and assault” and “burglary, looting and vandalism” as threats. There’s no mention of the constitutional precept of someone being presumed innocent until proven guilty.
- Co-opting the National Park Service and the U.S., Park Police into criminal arrest duties. Trump also wants the agencies to induct more officers, even if they have to waive training requirements. And he wants the U.S. Attorney for D.C., former Fox News personality Jean Pirro, to hire more prosecutors.
- Establishing a special law and order unit within the D.C. National Guard. Unlike in states, Trump controls the D.C. guard.
The special unit will be “dedicated to ensuring public safety and order.” In D.C. Bondi and three other Cabinet officers, including controversial Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and even-more-controversial Defense Secretary Hegseth, “shall each deputize the members of this unit to enforce federal law.”
Parenthetically, in announcing his executive orders, Trump opined the Defense Secretary should be renamed by the department’s old moniker, as the Secretary Of War.
And Hegseth “shall immediately begin ensuring each state’s Army National Guard and Air National Guard are resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist federal, state and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate,” Trump said.
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