President Donald Trump promised on Monday to clean up crime and vagrancy in the nation’s capital by shifting more responsibilities over the district to the federal government.
Trump made the announcement during a press conference at the White House, where he laid out a number of executive actions he was taking to fight violent crime, decrease homelessness, and otherwise clean up Washington, D.C.
“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse,” Trump said. “ This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re gonna take our capital back. We’re taking it back.”
Trump on Monday invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act and declared a public emergency. This granted him to move the D.C. Police Department under the control of the Justice Department. DEA Administrator Terry Cole will head the department, per Trump’s orders.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and U.S. District Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro all appeared alongside Trump at the news conference.
The president also added that he was sending 800 National Guard troops to patrol the streets of D.C. Last week, the administration sent 500 federal agents into the district, including from the FBI, ATF, DEA, Park Police, the U.S. Marshal Service, the Secret Service, and the Department of Homeland Security.
“The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on earth,” Trump said, adding that “the only language” that criminals understand is when you “knock the hell out of them.”
The president added that he would like to see Republicans in Congress move to end cashless bail in the district, saying that the policy led to lawlessness in the streets. Trump added that he planned to improve infrastructure in the district and crack down on homeless encampments.
“We’re going to replace the medians that are falling down all over the roads. We’re gonna replace the potholes,” he said.
Burgum, who briefly spoke during the conference, said that Park Police had cleared over 70 homeless camps from D.C. since March 27.
“We’re going to be removing homeless encampments from all over our parks, our beautiful, beautiful parks, which now a lot of people can’t walk on,” Trump said. “We’re moving the encampments away, trying to take care of people. Some of those people, we don’t know how they even got there.”