One year on, our nation’s capital is still under military occupation

A year ago this week, National Guard troops rolled into Washington under orders from Donald Trump, who invoked crime rates that were actually at 30-year lows to justify putting soldiers on street corners in the capital of a country that has historically refused military rule at home.

Twelve months later, the “temporary” deployment has become a fixture of the city’s landscape, extended by the administration all the way past the next general election of 2028 and on through Inauguration Day 2029. What began as an emergency has been made permanent by presidential decree.

The bill for Trump’s order runs into the billions. What started out costing nearly $1 million a day has climbed past $3 million, with total costs projected between $2.5 and $3.4 billion by the time it’s scheduled to end (if it ends).

That money could put a roof over the head of every unhoused person in D.C., along with all those in most of the states whose governors shipped Guard members to the capital. Instead, it buys soldiers standing post at Metro stops and lending muscle to ICE raids in Black and brown neighborhoods. It’s the kind of work that no military training ever anticipated and which no democracy should require of its troops.

This occupation was never really about safety. It was a testing ground, an attempt to find out how much of the capital could be placed under federal military control, how compliant could a Democratic mayor be made, how far could red-state governors be enlisted in occupying a majority-Black city before the country objected.

And D.C. is not alone: Armed Guard units remain stationed under the same ‘crime’ pretext in Memphis, and they occupied New Orleans for many months, both majority-Black cities, making clear this was never a one-city experiment but a template.

Meanwhile, the courts that ruled the deployments illegal have been simply ignored or overruled via appeals to judges more friendly to the administration. That is the shape fascism takes when it doesn’t need to announce itself: a slow accumulation of facts on the ground that no ruling and no election can undo.

D.C. has not accepted this quietly.

Free DC, the coalition dedicated to protecting D.C. home rule, has organized demonstrations, initiated letter campaigns, and put pressure on the governors, Democratic and Republican alike, who send troops to Washington. Activists on the ground, like those with the D.C.-based Claudia Jones School for Political Education, have helped build the case for community control of police and D.C. statehood as the only lasting answers to a government that treats home rule as optional. The D.C. Council has publicly demanded governors recall their Guard units.

And everyday residents, 79% of whom oppose this occupation, have kept marching and insisting that a capital under military watch is not a capital that belongs to its people.

Their resistance matters because Washington was never meant to be a proving ground for authoritarian rule, and every city, from Los Angeles to Chicago, watching what happens here should understand that D.C.’s fight is theirs, too. A year of occupation is a year too many. Aug. 11, 2027, should serve not as another anniversary to observe but as a deadline to organize against—one that ends the military takeover of our capital.

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