Politics

Trump is shocking official Washington. Will he leave his mark on the District too?

Published

1 year ago

February 16, 2025

Blue Light Newsroom

Donald Trump isn’t just looking to remake the federal government. He has his sights set on the city of Washington, too.

In his first few weeks in office, the president has moved to drastically alter the fabric of the nation’s capital.

He ordered thousands of Washington-area federal workers to return to the office — some of whom his administration is moving to lay off. He injected himself and his allies onto the board of the John F. Kennedy Center to recast “woke” performing art culture. And the city’s mayor said she has been briefed on a pending executive order on topics like public safety and homeless encampments in the city.

The flurry of actions drives home that Trump has a dark view of his adopted, part-time home — possibly influenced by the fact that more than 90 percent of its residents supported his opponent in the 2024 election. He called the District a city of “filth” and “decay,” an insult reminiscent of ones he has hurled at other major cities he has feuded with like Baltimore or New York.

Trump has cast his departure from Washington in 2021 as a pivot point for the city. He rarely returned to Washington during his four years out of power — with a notable exception being an August 2023 trip from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to a D.C. federal court, during which he pleaded not guilty to four counts to overturn the 2020 elections.

It was “very sad driving through Washington, D.C. and seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and graffiti,” Trump said on the tarmac just before leaving the D.C. area. “This is not the place that I left. It’s a very sad thing to see.”

D.C. is rebounding from the pandemic, which battered the region’s economy that is supported by in-person work from federal employees, ushered in a since-diminished spike in crime and exacerbated the city’s homelessness crisis.

The president and Congress have the authority to undercut the District’s political machinery by rejecting any bill the local administration puts forward and proposing their own. And Trump’s congressional allies have already moved to disrupt the power balance in the District through legislation introduced earlier this month that could undo a 1970s-era law that allowed the nation’s capital to largely govern itself.

Republicans have made similar threats to undermine the D.C. government during Mayor Muriel Bowser’s decade-long tenure. But they were toothless because of Democratic opposition in Congress or the White House.

Even when Republicans gained control of the House and Senate during Trump’s first term, he didn’t follow through on his threats, including one that would have overridden D.C. governance by temporarily overtaking agencies like the Metropolitan police. Trump also relied heavily on executive orders to go after immigrants from sanctuary cities like D.C., but those were not targeted specifically to his then-home city and were mostly rescinded by former President Joe Biden.

This time, a reenergized Trump armed again with a Republican majority in Congress has said he would tighten his grip on D.C.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

If Trump and congressional Republicans dip into city affairs, they would drastically shift the relationship between the Bowser administration and the federal government, which has largely stayed out of local politics in recent years.

About two years ago, Congress stymied local efforts to decrease crime penalties, marking the first time in three decades that Capitol Hill officials have successfully flexed this muscle. Congress has also repeatedly passed a rider blocking commercial sales of recreational marijuana in the District.

Republicans on Capitol Hill have justified the local government takeover by skewering the Bowser administration for a recent surge in crime that they say she has mishandled. Homicides surged during the pandemic to a decades-long zenith of 273 cases in 2023, though this figure dipped by 32 percent in 2024, according to D.C. police data.

“The radically progressive regime of D.C. Mayor Bowser has left our nation’s Capital in crime-ridden shambles,” Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), one of the co-sponsors for the latest congressional push to defang D.C.’s government, said in a press release. “Bowser and her corrupt Washington City Council are incapable of managing the city.”

Republicans have made threats to undermine the D.C. government during Mayor Muriel Bowser’s decadelong tenure.

Bowser and the council have grown tougher on crime since Trump’s first term. Last March, as the city reeled from a spate of carjackings and homicides, the local government passed a crime omnibus package that imposed harsher penalties for crimes like retail theft and illegal gun possession.

“We will not tolerate violence and we will not tolerate criminal activity that disrupts our sense of safety and our ability to build thriving neighborhoods,” Bowser said in a statement following the passage of the bill.

Bowser has tried to further soothe Trump and other Republicans by focusing on “shared priorities for the president’s second term,” like bringing the D.C. region’s federal workforce back to underutilized federal buildings and developing more green spaces and infrastructure, she said in December.

Now, as the city attempts to maintain diplomacy with Republicans, the largely Democratic D.C. Council has to get creative to pass their agendas.

Before Republicans took control of Congress and the presidency on Election Day, the city council was about to pass a pair of bills that would have required insurers to study reparations and fully cover vasectomy procedures. Weeks after the GOP assumed control of Congress and the presidency, the council changed the name of the vasectomy bill to the “Insurance Regulation Amendment Act” as part of a preemptive effort to dodge ire from Republicans, who had launched a national crusade against reproductive rights.

“When we had a fight over the revised criminal code, the Council lost control of the messaging,” Council chairman Phil Mendelson told The Washington Post. “Lesson learned. We need to be sensitive to messaging.”

For her part, Bowser still appears optimistic about her relationship with Trump — who she met with at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in December — even as the president further derides her city and leadership.

“I agree with the president-elect on this point,” Bowser said in December. “We want to make our nation’s capital the most beautiful capital in the world.”

Politics

Summer ICE

Published

1 hour ago

June 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A hectic summer of events brings the threat of ICE agents surging into New York City.

WINTRY MIX: The Knicks ticker-tape parade. World Cup festivities. Pride Month. America 250. The Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce wedding.

It’s all happening this summer in New York City — and those events and more may coincide with a surge in federal immigration enforcement at the direction of President Donald Trump’s administration.

The convergence of events as an ICE crackdown looms has not gone unnoticed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and immigrant-rights advocates who are already bracing for a hectic summer in the city.

Hochul last week warned that a surge would “create chaos” especially as the World Cup was getting underway. The mayor told reporters earlier today that the city — and especially the NYPD — is prepared to handle the uncertainty.

“We are the biggest city in the country,” Mamdani said at a press conference in Queens. “We are used to big events, and we are incredibly excited for this one.”

Yet the potential operation — teased repeatedly by Trump border czar Tom Homan — adds a different dimension to the center-of-the-world festivities and celebratory atmosphere that’s pervasive in New York at the moment.

“We’ve just had a lot of practice with being in the streets — thankfully celebrating,” said state Sen. Pat Fahy, a Democrat. “It’s New York. People are not going to tolerate any type of surge here.”

Homan has insisted the federal government’s New York campaign will be much different than the Minneapolis crackdown six months ago, which ultimately led to civil unrest and the deaths of two U.S. citizens.

He told SiriusXM’s Chris Cuomo last week that federal immigration agents would take a refined, precision-based approach.

“Every day we leave the office and we know exactly who we’re looking for, more likely where we will find them, because we have a targeted operation,” Homan said. “We have a folder on each target. It’s not gonna be driving around looking for people that we have no idea who we’re looking for. It’s gonna be a well-planned, targeted operation.”

Trump’s aggressive deportation campaign led Hochul and the Democratic-led Legislature this year to approve a package of measures meant to protect undocumented immigrants.

Law enforcement officers are banned from wearing masks, federal immigration authorities cannot execute civil deportation warrants in so-called sensitive locations like houses of worship, and the state moved to end cooperative agreements between local police and ICE.

“We’re much better prepared as a result of that legislation,” Fahy said. “We’ve sent a very clear and strong message that ICE is not welcome.”

It’s those very same laws, though, that stoked Homan’s plans to focus on New York. He’s warned that, without cooperation with local law enforcement, ICE will need to take a much more expansive approach to deportations.

It’s all led immigration advocates to ready communities for an unpredictable summer.

“New Yorkers are going to stand up for their neighbors,” said Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition. “You’re going to see local communities organizing more, potentially protests, people standing up for New York and New Yorkers. This is an attack on all 19 million New Yorkers.” — Nick Reisman with Gelila Negesse

FROM CITY HALL

Mayor Zohran Mamdani continues to discuss disbanding the SRG but has offered no timeline.

POLICING PARTY CITY: Days after being sworn in as mayor, Mamdani declared that his promise to abolish the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group wasn’t up for debate.

“We need to disband the SRG,” he said on Jan. 28 after the unit had been involved in arresting anti-ICE protesters. “I’m currently in conversations with the police commissioner about the ways in which we do so that are operational.”

Six months later, the SRG remains intact — and Mamdani is singing a very different tune.

When asked today if it was appropriate for the police department to deploy the SRG in response to the chaos following the Knicks’ NBA Finals victory, the mayor had this to say: “The NYPD handled themselves appropriately in delivering safety across the five boroughs.”

Mamdani told reporters he remains committed to the idea of “decoupling” the SRG’s protest responsibilities from its counterterrorism duties and that he continues to talk with his NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, about how “to disband SRG to ensure that we have responses to each.” He did not give a timeline for how soon that could happen or elaborate on the nature of the holdup, though.

Mamdani’s thumbs up for the SRG’s response to Saturday’s Midtown mayhem speaks to the awkward terrain he’s navigating as his more politically moderate police commissioner continues to reject his push for breaking up the unit.

Tisch, in fact, has continued to publicly and privately praise the SRG as a critical tool in the NYPD toolbox. On Sunday, she gave members of the unit a salute in a department-wide email thanking officers for their work the night before, when frenzied Knicks fans set fire to or destroyed several school buses in Midtown, smashed NYPD vehicles with bats and even fired shots in Times Square, wounding a 17-year-old.

“You managed to meet the challenges that came with one of the most closely watched periods this city has seen in years,” Tisch wrote in the email obtained by Playbook that included a shoutout to those engaged in “SRG disorder-control response.”

While pushing for breaking up the SRG as a mayoral candidate last year, Mamdani noted the unit’s members face disproportionately high rates of misconduct claims, especially as it relates to violating protesters’ First Amendment rights.

In dragging his feet on the SRG issue, Mamdani has put himself at odds with his own political base.

The local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America issued a rare public rebuke of the mayor Friday for not making good on his campaign pledge to eliminate the SRG.

The DSA’s statement also knocked Mamdani for not fulfilling a separate campaign pledge to abolish the NYPD’s gang database (which critics say is a “drag net” for young Black and Latino New Yorkers, but which Tisch touts as a necessity). On top of that, the DSA — Mamdani’s “political home” — also took aim at him for supporting an increase to the NYPD’s uniformed headcount this year despite having promised as a candidate to keep it flat. — Gelila Negesse and Chris Sommerfeldt

From the Capitol

State Sen. Zellnor Myrie’s 2021 gun-control measure remains in effect after the Supreme Court declines review.

GUN BILL SURVIVES: The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a New York law aimed at opening up gun companies to civil liability suits.

Federal law has made the firearms industry generally immune to lawsuits since 2005. But state Sen. Zellnor Myrie proposed a workaround in 2021, authoring a statute to expand New York’s ability to sue manufacturers and dealers whose “reckless” actions endanger public safety.

The law that passed was quickly challenged by the gun industry. A series of lower courts have upheld the law in recent years, and the Supreme Court has now decided it won’t consider an appeal.

“For New Yorkers and residents of the ten other states that have adopted similar laws — covering close to 117 million Americans — this serves as affirmation for victims, survivors, and communities across the nation that live with the realities of gun violence on a daily basis,” Myrie said in a statement. “We are not helpless. Gun violence is not inevitable.” — Bill Mahoney

IN OTHER NEWS

— ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: Progressives Champions PAC, which has spent nearly $400,000 in attack ads against NY-17 Democratic candidate Cait Conley, is reportedly funded by Republican groups. (Popular Information)

— MAKE IT MAKE CENTS: Mamdani’s administration will no longer delay billions of dollars in repayments to contracted nonprofits. (NBC New York)

— INSURANCE SCRAMBLE: Federal cuts will leave 450,000 New Yorkers enrolled in the state’s Essential Plan without healthcare coverage beginning next month. (New York Focus)

Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.