Amid President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in Washington, D.C., the FBI has started sending about 120 agents on overnight shifts to help local law enforcement battle carjackings and other violent crime, according to The Washington Post.
This comes as Trump has threatened a federal takeover of the city, even as data shows violent crime plummeting in the nation’s capital. The president was recently outraged after a young administration staffer was reportedly assaulted in an attempted carjacking.
On Saturday, Trump announced that a Monday press conference would end violent crime in Washington. On Sunday, he took to Truth Social again, this time to call on the city’s homeless to “clear out” “immediately.” The president compared his crime-battling action to his work restricting illegal immigration at the southern border.
The FBI agents from the bureau’s counterintelligence, public corruption, and other units are now set to take part in traffic stops, for which they lack the proper training, The Post noted.
Trump ordered federal law enforcement agents from a number of agencies to be sent into city streets last week, and he said more juveniles should be charged in the justice system as adults.
The paper found that the diversion to local crime has caused frustration at the FBI. Most of the 120 agents authorized by the administration to battle crime alongside D.C. police come from the Washington Field Office. FBI agents usually don’t have the authority to conduct traffic stops, and people familiar with the situation told The Post that the agents could be dispatched to support other agencies.
Federal land is all across the nation’s capital, and local law enforcement often works side by side with federal agents to patrol it. However, these duties usually fall to the U.S. Park Police and the Secret Service, and not the FBI.
Anonymous top officials in the D.C. police department told The Post that the Trump administration hasn’t asked how to deploy these additional resources. As D.C. is not a state, federal authorities can exert more control over the city even as residents and local elected leaders protest.
D.C. residents elect their own mayor and city council following the 1973 Home Rule Act. However, a federal takeover of Washington’s police department would be an unusual use of power in a city where local leaders have few ways to resist federal intrusions.
On Sunday morning, the FBI told The Post in a statement that “Agents from the FBI Washington Field Office continue to participate in the increased federal law enforcement presence in D.C., which includes assisting our law enforcement partners.”
Trump took to Truth Social on Sunday afternoon to call out the city’s mayor.
“The Mayor of D.C., Muriel Bowser, is a good person who has tried, but she has been given many chances, and the Crime Numbers get worse, and the City only gets dirtier and less attractive,” he said.
Appearing on MSNBC on Sunday, Bowser said Washington was “not experiencing a crime spike.”
“It is true that we had a terrible spike in crime in 2023, but this is not 2023,” she said. “We have spent over the last two years driving down violent crime in this city, driving it down to a 30-year low.”
The capital’s police department reported that violent crime in the first seven months of this year was down by 26 percent compared with 2024. Overall, crime was down roughly seven percent.
“If the priority is to show force in an American city, we know he can do that here,” Bowser added. “But it won’t be because there’s a spike in crime.”
