D.C. attorney general sues Trump administration over ‘hostile takeover’ of police
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D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb has sued President Donald Trump over his executive actions asserting control over the D.C. police department and attempting to install an emergency police commissioner, one of the most extraordinary exertions of federal power in the city’s half-century of home rule.
The lawsuit came hours after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered sweeping changes to law enforcement policies in the city and said a Trump administration official should assume all duties and responsibilities of the police chief, drawing immediate legal pushback from Schwalb and Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D).
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Schwalb called it the “gravest threat to Home Rule that the District has ever faced.”
“By declaring a hostile takeover of MPD, the Administration is abusing its limited, temporary authority under the Home Rule Act, infringing on the District’s right to self-governance and putting the safety of DC residents and visitors at risk,” Schwalb said in a statement. “The Administration’s unlawful actions are an affront to the dignity and autonomy of the 700,000 Americans who call DC home. This is the gravest threat to Home Rule that the District has ever faced, and we are fighting to stop it.”
Schwalb is asking a federal judge to find that Trump and Bondi’s actions are unconstitutional and exceed limits on power in the D.C. Home Rule Act, which includes a provision allowing the president to declare an emergency and temporarily use local police for federal purposes, as Trump did Monday. Schwalb asked the judge to block Bondi’s order and keep control of police with the mayor and police chief.
Bondi ordered the mayor and D.C. Police Chief Pamela A. Smith to recognize Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, as the District’s “emergency police commissioner,” empowering him to assume the full powers of the D.C. police chief and issue department policy. She also ordered the immediate suspension of D.C. police policies limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
Schwalb and Bowser suggested Thursday evening the city will not comply with the order, and Schwalb told Smith to continue operating as the chief – the first significant sign of resistance from the city’s top officials since Trump exerted control over the police force Monday.
She said there is nothing in the law that would support ceding “the District’s personnel authority to a federal official.”
“Let us be clear about what the law requires during a Presidential declared emergency: it requires the mayor of Washington, DC to provide the services of the Metropolitan Police Department for federal purposes at the request of the President,” Bowser said in a statement. “We have followed the law.”
Schwalb sent a letter to Smith on Thursday evening informing her that the “Bondi Order is unlawful” and “you are not legally obligated to follow it.”
“No official other than you may exercise all the powers and duties of the Chief of Police or issue any executive orders, general orders, or other written directives that apply to members of the MPD,” Schwalb wrote.
The pushback sets up a major power clash in entirely untested territory as the District clings to its limited home rule – granted under the 1973 Home Rule Act – and the Trump administration seeks to expand its control of law enforcement under the stated premise of a crime emergency at a time when violent crime is at a 30-year low.
The conflict is also the starkest illustration in three decades of the vast power that the federal government retains over the nation’s capital: The very law that gave D.C. the right to an elected local government also includes a provision allowing the president to “direct” the D.C. mayor to provide police services for federal purposes if the president declares an emergency – the provision Trump triggered on Monday.
Bondi’s order was the first set of explicit directives issued to Bowser and Smith after the two spent days insisting that they retained control of the police department and that the arrangement with the Trump administration was more of a collaborative partnership. The directive appeared designed to put to rest questions about who was at the top of the chain of command. It came just hours after Smith again showed an openness to offering greater cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a new executive order – again showing the limits of the Bowser administration’s attempt to balance cooperating with the Trump administration while retaining the city’s liberal values and policies.
Trump on Monday nominated Cole to oversee the police department. But while federal agents surged and unarmed National Guard troops deployed onto city streets, there initially weren’t any other explicit directives, and officials said the department was operating as normal. Smith said on FOX5 Wednesday that she saw the federal operation and enhanced presence as a boost for crime-fighting efforts that “is going to impact us in a positive way.”
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But the Trump administration’s ramp-up of federal agents on city streets, including federal immigration authorities, has had residents increasingly on edge. Some onlookers protested a federal checkpoint on a busy corridor Wednesday night, warning motorists of ICE agents and yelling at officers. Several lawmakers said Thursday that the time had come to forcefully push back – particularly after Smith on Thursday morning in her new executive order sought to expand cooperation with ICE.
Smith’s order allowed officers to share information with ICE about people D.C. police stopped but did not arrest, and also allowed them to help ICE to transport detainees – a move that outraged a number of D.C. Council members.
“That’s a huge betrayal of our values as D.C. residents,” D.C. Council member Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) said in an interview.
Smith’s order retained restrictions on helping ICE with immigration arrests or inquiring about people’s immigration status while in their custody – limitations that reflect D.C. law.
But by Thursday night, Bondi rescinded Smith’s new order and suspended the existing D.C. police policies that had placed guardrails on cooperation with ICE – a dramatic policy shift in a deep-blue District that, during Trump’s first term, the mayor proudly called a “sanctuary city.”
Trump has repeatedly targeted Democratic cities with sanctuary-city laws that restrict or prohibit local law enforcement from aiding immigration authorities. He said of D.C. on Monday that “this city will no longer be a sanctuary for illegal alien criminals. We will have full, seamless, integrated cooperation at all levels of law enforcement and will deploy officers across the District with an overwhelming presence.”
The Justice Department said Bondi believed Smith’s order would allow D.C. to continue with some of its sanctuary-city policies. In the order she issued Thursday night, Bondi rescinded Smith’s 2024 order limiting police inquiries into the immigration status of residents and one from 2023 that stopped police from making arrests solely for immigration violations.
“D.C. will not remain a sanctuary city actively shielding criminal aliens. It will not happen,” Bondi told Fox News’s Sean Hannity in an interview Thursday evening. “You must comply. You must give the information to our ICE – to our homeland security – officers. If they have information on an illegal alien living in D.C., they must give us that information.”
Multiple D.C. lawmakers immediately condemned Bondi’s order Thursday night.
“This order is a patently unlawful power grab that represents a break-the-glass moment for our democracy. It cannot and will not stand,” Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5) said in a statement, arguing that Bondi did not have the power to change D.C. laws and policies.
Like Trump’s asserted takeover of the D.C. police department, Bondi’s order has no modern precedent.
The Home Rule Act says that the president may “direct” the mayor to provide police services for federal purposes and that the mayor “shall provide” them to him. On Monday, Trump sent a letter to the mayor saying he was directing her to “submit to the President, through the Attorney General, the services of the Metropolitan Police force for federal purposes.”
But in part because the law is untested, confusion reigned in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s executive action about the chain of command at the D.C. police department.
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D.C. officials have interpreted the Home Rule Act to mean that they are providing law enforcement services to the president while retaining ownership of the department – not surrendering total control. The provision is titled “Emergency control of police,” and the White House made clear Tuesday they saw the president as the one in control. In his executive order he delegated his authority to Bondi.
But in his letter to Smith, Schwalb argued that the plain language of the Home Rule Act in no way allowed Bondi’s orders and that the act did not say anything about allowing a federal official to rescind or change D.C. police policies or to remove the chief of police. “Members of MPD must continue to follow your orders and not the orders of any official not appointed by the Mayor,” Schwalb wrote.
D.C.’s law limiting cooperation with ICE – known as the Sanctuary Values Amendment Act of 2020 – has recently drawn attention from Congress. Earlier this year, the Republican-controlled House voted to nullify D.C.’s sanctuary-city law and mandate full cooperation with the federal authorities, part of a steady drumbeat of bills GOP lawmakers have taken up that intervene in D.C. policy.
The bill’s chances are unclear in the Senate, where the filibuster would require support from Democrats. But if Bondi’s order were carried out, it would achieve the same end.
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