Trump targets D.C. migrants, homeless encampments in latest executive order

D.C. – you’ve got some new minders.

On Thursday evening, President Donald Trump issued a new executive order creating a federal task force seemingly charged with overseeing things that D.C. is already doing to address crime and homelessness, while also ramping up immigration enforcement and allowing more people to carry concealed weapons.

According to Trump’s order, the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force will seek to “make the District of Columbia safe, beautiful, and prosperous by preventing crime, punishing criminals, preserving order, protecting our revered American monuments, and promoting beautification and the preservation of our history and heritage.” 

The order says the federal government will assist the Metropolitan Police Department in recruiting and retaining police officers, help the city get its long-troubled crime lab reaccredited and up to full capacity, “increase the speed and lower the cost” of processing permits to carry concealed handguns, push to ensure that more people accused of violent crimes are held as they await trial, and assist with increased fare evasion enforcement on Metro.

The order also says that federal authorities will ensure “maximum enforcement of immigration law” and monitor D.C.’s “sanctuary-city status and compliance with enforcement of Federal immigration law.” Finally, the order puts the onus on the National Park Service to remove graffiti from federal monuments and memorials faster, and to “rapidly clear all homeless encampments” on federal lands.

The executive order grows out of Trump’s repeated comments during his presidential campaign and in recent months that D.C. is overrun by criminals and packed with homeless encampments. In February, he mused about taking over the city (which would require an act of Congress), and during a speech at the Department of Justice earlier this month he touted his efforts to clean it up.

“We’re cleaning up this great capital, and we’re not going to have crime and we’re not going to stand for crime, and we’re going to take the graffiti down and we’re already taking tents down there,” he said.

Still, portions of Trump’s order merely restate initiatives D.C. is already undertaking. For the last two years, D.C. has been offering significant hiring bonuses to boost recruitment of new police officers, a response to declines in manpower since 2020. The crime lab has regained partial accreditation. Metro has ramped up enforcement of fare evasion with new faregates and increased police presence on trains and buses, and just this week passed a new policy to ban certain offenders from the system. D.C. is already holding more people accused of violent offenses before trial. On Monday, Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto introduced a package of bills to increase staffing at MPD and the Department of Corrections, as well as make permanent recent changes to pretrial detention. 

On homelessness, since at least 2021 D.C. has ramped up its cleaning and clearing of encampments throughout the city, including on federal lands like McPherson Square and outside Union Station. According to data from the city, in Dec. 2024 there were 81 remaining encampments throughout D.C., down from 105 a year prior. And over the course of 2024, D.C. closed a total of 46 encampments, while taking part in hundreds of “engagements” where trash was removed and the sites were cleaned. 

Earlier this month, D.C. sped up the planned clearing of homeless encampments close to the State Department after Trump complained about them on social media. Mayor Muriel Bowser said the city continually looked to clear encampments, though with a preference to doing so when people living there could be put in housing. “We always do, and we do it according to protocols that have worked in the District that won’t have the effect of just moving people around, but trying to get them housed,” she said.

Advocates have argued that closing encampments without addressing temporary and permanent housing options for residents just pushes them from one site to another, sometimes just days apart, as Street Sense Media reported earlier this month.

Still, other portions of Trump's order could spell significant changes for the city. It remains to be seen what the immigration enforcement provisions will entail, but just this week an attempt by federal immigration authorities to detain a school worker in Adams Morgan was foiled by school officials who demanded to see a warrant. D.C. has already tried to quietly step back on advertising its status as a “sanctuary city,” a term for the laws that limit how much local law enforcement can cooperate with federal immigration authorities. 

The order also pledges to increase the deployment of federal law enforcement in federal sites across D.C. to ensure that “all applicable quality of life, nuisance, and public-safety laws are strictly enforced.” That includes a range of offenses, such as “unpermitted” demonstrations. While large-scale protests on the National Mall are often permitted, D.C. rarely requires permits for protests and demonstrations that happen throughout the city.

That Trump’s order treads somewhat lightly on local control of the city may well be because of Bowser’s diplomatic attempts to mollify him. Most notably, earlier this year she agreed to deconstruct Black Lives Matter Plaza just north of the White House, and she and D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith expressed tacit support of Trump’s decision to pardon two D.C. police officers who were convicted in relation to the death of Karon Hylton-Brown in 2020. This month Trump said Bowser “has been doing a good job.” Bowser’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Regardless, Bowser’s efforts have only gone so far. Trump’s task force doesn’t formally include any D.C. officials, and will be chaired by the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. That slight wasn’t lost on D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who lambasted the executive order in a statement on Thursday night.

“President Trump’s thoroughly anti-home rule EO is insulting to the 700,000 D.C. residents who live in close proximity to a federal government, which continues to deny them the same rights afforded to other Americans. The task force created by the EO would not include a single D.C. official to represent the interests of the people who reside within the District,” she said. “The Revolutionary War was fought to give consent to the governed and to end taxation without representation. President Trump’s rhetoric runs counter to this history. D.C.’s population is larger than that of two states. D.C. pays more federal taxes per capita than any state and pays more federal taxes than 21 states. D.C.’s gross domestic product is larger than that of 15 states. D.C. residents have fought and died in all this nation’s wars. We deserve statehood.”

On Friday, Trump took one more action related to D.C.: He urged the House to close the $1.1 billion hole they created in the city’s local budget, which local officials have warned could lead to layoffs in the police department. “The House should take up the D.C. funding ‘fix’ that the Senate has passed, and get it done IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We need to clean up our once beautiful Capital City, and make it beautiful again. We will be TOUGH ON CRIME, like never before.”