President Trump told a packed press briefing room at the White House that Monday was “Liberation Day” at Washington, D.C., as he formally announced he is federalizing its battle against rampant crime.

“This is Liberation Day in DC and we’re gonna take our capital back,” he said from the podium, flanked by top members of his administration, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro.

“We’re taking it back. Under the authorities vested in me as the president of the United States, I’m officially invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act … and placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control.”

The president signed two executive orders prior to his press conference; one was to invoke his presidential powers under the Home Rule Act to take over the Metropolitan Police Department. The other was a presidential memorandum that directs the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who was also in attendance, to deploy National Guard troops at the nation’s capital.

“We will work alongside all D.C. police and federal law enforcement,” Mr. Hegseth said, adding that the National Guard will be “flowing into the streets of Washington in the coming week.”

Eight-hundred D.C. National Guard Troops will be deployed throughout the city, with other specialized units from the military to be sent out if needed.

Mr. Trump claimed that the D.C. murder rate is higher than in cities like Bogota, Colombia, and Mexico City.

“You wanna be able to leave your apartment or your house where you live and feel safe, and go into a store to buy a newspaper or buy something, and you don’t have that now,” he said. “The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City … some other places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth, much higher.”

Mr. Trump indicated that the law-enforcement plan could be used in other cities down the line.

“We have other cities also that are bad, very bad. You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem,” he said. “We’re not gonna let it happen. We’re not gonna lose our cities over this. This will go further. We’re starting very strongly with D.C. and we’re gonna clean it up real quick, very quickly, as they say.”

“If the capital is dirty, the whole country is dirty,” he said during another point in his remarks.

The president has already sent out 450 officers from 18 different federal agencies, including the FBI and the Secret Service, to conduct patrols in high-traffic areas throughout the city. A total of 120 FBI agents have been temporarily reassigned to night patrol of various neighborhoods at D.C., according to a report from the Washington Post.

Mr. Trump’s long desire to use the National Guard for law enforcement, especially in the nation’s capital, was only exacerbated by the recent attack against a former DOGE staffer, Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, who a group of teenagers savagely beat during a late-night carjacking at downtown D.C.

“They are not afraid of law enforcement because they know nothing ever happens to them, but it’s going to happen now,” Mr. Trump said in a Truth Social post at the time.

Congressman Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee immediately called the president to task for his actions.

“In another transparent ploy to distract America from his coverup of the Epstein file, Donald Trump now wants to militarize the District of Columbia to attack crime and clean up graffiti in the capital city despite the fact that crime is at a 30-year low,” he said in a statement.

“No one in Washington is asking Trump to deploy the National Guard or take over the MPD. This is a phony, manufactured crisis if I’ve ever seen one.”

According to figures from the Department of Justice, Washington saw a decline in violent crime in 2024, seeing a 30-year low, a trend in line with cities across the country.

Homicides in the district are down by more than 10 percent compared to last year, sex abuse is down by nearly 50 percent, and robbery is down by almost 30 percent, according to 2025 year-to-date data from the Metropolitan Police Department.

In a press conference on Monday afternoon, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said that the city would comply with the law and not try to block Mr. Trump’s new executive order but was insistent that crime rates in the city have lowered.

“I believe that the President’s view of D.C. is shaped by his Covid-era experience during his first term, and it is true that those were more challenging times related to some issues. It is also true that we experienced a crime spike post-Covid,” she said, adding that not only is the crime rate  down from the spike in 2023, it is also lower than pre-pandemic levels in 2019.

“And while this action today is unsettling and unprecedented, I can’t say that given some of the rhetoric of the past, that we’re totally surprised,” Ms. Bowser added.

However, the data cited by Ms. Bowser may be flawed.

“There have been efforts to skew the data. The FBI recently changed the way they are collecting and reporting data under the Biden administration, which has led to questions about the reliability of some of that data,” a former federal prosecutor, Zach Smith, who currently serves as a senior legal fellow with the Heritage Foundation, said to The New York Sun. “Certainly with respect to D.C., we are seeing the murder rate, in some instances, come down from all-time highs or near all-time highs.”

“But if you go back and look at the general trend lines compared to five, six, seven years ago, unfortunately, many violent crimes today are still much higher than they were during that previous period.”

Mr. Smith also points out that numbers may be dropping because many do not report incidents in which they were the victims of a violent crime.

“The other thing I think you’re seeing happening not only in D.C. but also in blue cities, around the country is unfortunately many people are simply not reporting many types of crimes due to the fact that they believe that either there will be no arrests made or that even if an arrest will be made there won’t be prosecution,” he said to the Sun.

“I’d say a good measure of how crime actually may be is this: How many people would be willing to let their loved ones walk down the street in D.C. at night?”