Transcript of When the National Guard Comes to Town

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From the New York Times. I'm Michael Bavaro. This is the Daily One month after sending the National Guard into Washington to fight crime there, President Trump is so pleased with the results that that he's now discussing how to put federal troops onto the streets of cities across the country, from Chicago to New Orleans. It's a potentially dramatic expansion of what has already become an unprecedented military deployment on domestic soil. Today, my colleague Jessica Chung speaks with residents of Washington about what it's really like to when the National Guard comes to town. It's Monday, September 8th.

I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor. And worse. Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people. And we're not going to let it happen anymore. We're not going to take it. This is Liberation Day in D.C. and we're going to take our capital back. We're taking it back.

A day after President Donald Trump announced he was deploying National Guard troops into Washington, D.C. the first humvees started rolling in. We lined up between the African American History Museum and the Holocaust Museum along the National Mall. About 800 troops eventually came, and they weren't alone. President Trump also called on the dea, Homeland Security and the FBI. My message to residents is this. We know that access to our Democracy is tenuous. D.C. mayor Emil Bowser complied with all of this, saying there wasn't much he could do, which makes sense. The city is a federal district where the president controls the National Guard. And while this action today is unsettlingly and unprecedented, I can't say that given some of the rhetoric of the past that were totally surprised, violent crime in Washington is actually falling dramatically. Some people found all this strange. Crime in D.C. has actually dropped to a 30 year low.

Let's look at some of this data. In 2023, D.C. had its most murders in more than two decades, 274. But it then plunged to 187 murders last year. And it's been falling again so far this year.

So there is no crime emergency.

So it's hard to say exactly what the purpose is.

You think it's really about crime? This is not about crime. This is about control. So people were resistant. This is not about public safety. This is about power. A Washington Post poll found that eight out of 10 residents were against the federal takeover of law enforcement. Whose city? Our city. Whose city? Our city. Whose city? Our city. To Americans who don't live in D.C. you think of the landmarks. The White House, the Monument, the Capitol. But to locals, they think of their city in terms of four. Northeast, Northwest, Southwest, and lastly Southeast, where crime is the highest. So we wanted to talk to people living there to know what they thought about this, how life has changed since the feds came to town. And they told me the streets are quieter, which is quite a change compared to what it's normally like, especially in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in southeast Congress Heights.

When you walk into Congress park, the tension is high. Every day, all day, you can feel the tension.

Shootings all the time. I hear gunshots all day long.

There are young guys killing each other.

Child got killed. She got shot riding a scooter. It's trouble.

We talked to two residents who work in neighborhood safety.

I'll drive to the doctor's office. And it's a shame that when you get in your car, you can't sit there like you used to because somebody will carjack you. So you just get in your car, lock the door, and pull off.

It's a loving community. It's just trauma felt. So in split second, it could go from loving to violence, you know what I mean? In a heartbeat.

And just taking our lives away from us. It's almost like we're in prison.

Sondra Segers was one of the people we talked to. She grew up in D.C. and lives in Congress Heights.

Grew up in zip code 20024, which is Ward 6, Southwest.

Sondra is 74 years old. She lives in a small brick house with manicured rose bushes and hydrangeas.

Look at my block. We keep the grass cut.

She's a community activist. Seven years ago, she founded a local group called Crave Concerned Residents Against Violence. They lobby the city to spend more money on safety and reward. When she hears that crime is at a low point in the city, even in her neighborhood, it doesn't feel that way to her. How do you react to people who say actually, crime is down and that people did try to stop the crime and it was successful?

I won't say they're fools because they don't live where I live. Almost every other night I can look down the street and see.

She says the crime problem in Congress Heights goes back decades. Her own brother was shot and killed in the 70s. But she says back then, crime was targeted toward people who were involved in it. And for the most part, bystanders were left alone.

And as time went on, things changed. There was more crime. The stores shut down.

But now, especially since the pandemic, she says, it feels like the violence is more random.

The criminal's getting younger and younger.

And for Sondra, that means more innocent people and even businesses are caught up in it.

First there was chicken place.

She points to a nearby storefront that can't seem to stay open.

Subway. At one point it was maybe a Mexican cuisine. One of the businesses moved so quickly, the wires were still hanging out the walls. It's like they didn't take time to push the wires in the wall. They just got out.

She says. After the murder of George Floyd, the police were too lenient on crime. She was also frustrated with a D.C. law that prevented kids from being charged with adult crimes. She was so fed up that she actually wrote a letter to the mayor and City Council asking for the National Guard to be sent in. And she wasn't alone. The Wards council member Trayon White did too, but the response was no.

The City council couldn't stop it. The police couldn't stop it. The mayor couldn't stop it.

So Sandra, too afraid to go outside, hasn't been to a grocery store in two years.

I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime. Bloodshed, bedlam.

She was listening to the local radio station one late afternoon when she heard the president describe the city as one beset by crime and lawlessness.

But you want to have safety in the streets. You want to be able to leave your apartment or your.

It resonated with her.

I did not vote for Donald Trump. I did not, and I don't agree with a lot of things he's doing. But when he decided to bring in the National Guard and the federal agencies, I was happy. The first day it was announced that same night that I didn't hear gunshots, no shootings and no stabbing. I saw one car come by and one person walking, and that was it. People calmed down.

She has yet to see federal agents in her neighborhood, but she says that her neighbors have. One of them sent her a video from his port surveillance camera. It shows a trail of 12 unmarked cars going down an alleyway. And she said that many of her neighbors feel the same as her.

They afford because we realize that no one else is trying to stop the criminals, and we all suffer. So with him, he's serious about it, and he's not going to play with them, which is good.

As for the people in D.C. who don't agree with her, who want them out, Sandra says they're protesting the wrong thing.

Where were all these protesters? Where were they when these children, babies, and toddlers were getting murdered? Where were they then? They didn't protest anything, but now they protest, and here's somebody trying to make it safer for us. They protesting them. Delusional.

Sondra says she still doesn't venture too far from home, but she now feels like she doesn't have to worry as much.

I don't be watching my back like I used to. I just go out. I be pulling the weeds from my flowers. I feel safer. I do.

Nah, what they're doing is putting a temporary fix on a bigger issue.

Not everyone in Congress Heights feels this way.

I believe It's a show three blocks over.

Levon Williams, a D.C. native, works in a nearby neighborhood complex as a violence interrupter for a local nonprofit. His target area is Congress Park.

Say two neighborhoods are beefing, getting into a shooting at each other. I go to one neighborhood first, speak to who I'm. You know, the lead is in that neighborhood. Then I go to the other neighborhood, do the same thing, bring the two neighborhoods together, and I mediate the conflict. I've been trained in cbt, cognitive behavior therapy. I've been trained.

Levon is trained in this line of.

Work, mental health and behavior training.

But he also says that he can do this because he has established credibility within the neighborhood.

Had my run ins with the system.

On the streets, he's known as Big Sykes, like psycho, a nickname he was given from his days as a troubled kid. He dealt drugs, ran with the wrong crowd, and ended up in juvie and then again in prison for a homicide that was ultimately overturned. And now he uses his reputation on the streets to try to prevent crime. He says that since the feds came to town, prevention seems to be taking a backseat to arrest. And it has left Levon feeling obsolete.

One of the things that I was tasked with doing was just trying to show them who we are, what we do in the community. And, you know, to my surprise, we've been ignored or discredited, you know, A.

Few days after the feds arrived, Levon got a call from a Mom in Congress park saying that the DEA had her son in handcuffs.

So when I got around there, say, how you doing, sir? My name is Levon Wynn. You know, I'm a violence interrupted community. You have one of my participants. You know, I was just wondering what, you know, what is he being held for? And they ignored me.

You know, he said the agents had smelled marijuana in the air. They searched the kid for drugs and any sign of narcotics, but didn't find any. Eventually they let him go. Is your understanding that with MPD in charge, it wouldn't have happened like this?

Right, Because MPD understand DC policy and procedures. The officer understands what he's trying to say. He knows how to deal with community members. Right. You know, whether it's his friends, older people, whoever. Right. What happens now is federal officers, they only understand federal codes and federal laws. So it's been a lot of misunderstandings in the communities.

My colleagues at the Times have found that a thousand arrests were made in the first two weeks since the federal takeover, many for low level offenses. So far they say that the deployment looks more like a sprawling dragnet than a precise crime fighting operation. And crime has fallen. The deterrence seems to be working. But to leave on this all feels excessive and the long term effect damaging. When you have agents policing people they.

Don'T know, these are things that the U.S. marshals and police officers don't do. They don't hold groups with people that they feel are criminals. Right. They don't take them to do community building. They don't do outreach. They don't do healing circles with young guys that are full of trauma, that are now trying to kill each other. They are more.

He says however the deterrence is working, it's not going to work for long. He thinks many of these guys are just waiting for the feds to leave. And in the meantime, their presence is just driving crime underground.

These guys are still going to find a way to make their money. They're going to find some building or somewhere to go into and still do everything that they planned on doing out on the streets. It's just on the inside.

Now, is this what you're hearing from people, that they are actually just doing this inside, away from the gaze of National Guard troops?

Yeah, there are men in this city that have three, four children. Right. They're the breadwinner of the home. And yeah, they're out here trying to find employment. But until they do, they have to figure out a way to feed their children. So now because of the presence of these officers, these Guys unable to sell the drugs to feed their children, now they're picking up the gun to find somebody to rob. You see? So you just went from a basic drug dealer that was standing on the corner selling drugs to someone that if the person makes the wrong moves, now you just created a murderer. So did you fix the problem?

He also says that the feds aren't focused on the more serious crimes they say they are here to solve. He points to something that happened on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue on the first day of school four days ago.

After the National Guard was deployed in D.C. there was a shooting. A 15 year old little boy got shot in his stomach. While we were there responding to that shooting, we, we knew that they were on their way. We just knew. Because this is a shooting of a child, this is why they say they're here. You know, this is the job that they're here to do, right? Later we got another notification that two more young men were shot right around the corner from this shoot. Within an hour, these people are coming outside to see what's going on. Mothers and fathers that's sitting out there hoping and praying that this is not one of their children laying on the ground. Like one of these agencies could have just been curious, right? As to what's going on. Right? Not one agency outside of NPD came to be curious and the whole community was out to see it. Here it is, right? Your opportunity to show the community why you're here and you don't come.

I mean, could it be possible that because MPD showed up that the other agencies didn't feel like they had to?

Well, if that's the case, then why don't you let MPD police the rest of this street? You're here being the big brother mpd. If you feel as though that you don't need to come because MPD has it under control, why are you here? But they are downtown catching Uber drivers at lights, asking them do they have their paperwork. Like you have the time to do this, right? You have the time to stereotype and harass people that are just trying to make an honest living, but when it comes to actual violence, you're nowhere to be found.

We'll be right back.

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Find out more@nytimes.com family days into the National Guard deployment. In some of the places where they were most visible, they were often kind of milling around. They were walking the halls of Union Station in the northeast of D.C. smiling with tourists and doing selfies. We're out here supporting the National Park.

Service and trying to keep federal areas clean.

They were seen picking up trash, even doing some landscaping, put down mulch beds.

Around the Tidal Basin as well as.

Flower placements in the city, a kind of beautification project.

And yet hundreds of National Guard troops.

Are flowing into the nation's capital.

Two weeks after the initial deployment, more troops had arrived.

Governors in six states, West Virginia, Mississippi.

Ohio, sent from seven states. These Republican governors answered Trump's requests for more support. Scoop trucks were seen clearing the personal belongings of homeless people, beds, tables and appliances at encampments in the city's northwest quadrant. Do you have any idea?

I will send back with you.

Checkpoints started popping up all over the city, including in the city's northwest quadrant, where there's a higher concentration of Latino residents. Food delivery times were getting slower. Moped drivers were getting stopped and detained. ICE eventually joined the police patrols and people started sharing images and videos of residents getting stopped on the streets, sometimes on foot, sometimes at traffic stop jobs, while driving in their cars. He was just driving. You're arresting him because it's a brown man. We talked to several people living in these neighborhoods, along with producer Carlos Prieto, gathering small snapshots of a changed city. Many of the people we spoke to wanted to remain anonymous out of fear for their own safety, including a woman who was a cook at a restaurant. She was preparing chicken when she looked out a window and saw officers set up a checkpoint right outside. One of her co workers had already been arrested in the week before her boss locked the doors. She and her colleagues continued working in the back kitchen in fear. We heard from other people who were changing their routines, like going to the grocery store. Families who would send one person out to the store instead of going together.

Parents and kids were navigating the new school year, carpooling so their kids didn't have to take the bus or the metro where a lot of troops had been stationed. Undocumented moms and dads who were handing off their kids to other parents to take them the rest of the way to school. Some families who take different routes altogether.

We have taken a different route. Not the main streets.

We talk to a ninth grader, an American citizen whose Salvadoran roots make him scared.

I've never felt this unsafe ever.

So he's changing things about himself.

I haven't talked Spanish out loud whenever I'm in the street.

Like how he speaks and where he goes.

Me, I like to go play soccer.

He no longer goes to the soccer field where he plays goalkeeper.

Play with other people.

But he's not going to lose his hair.

My curly hair. Like not cutting my hair too short, at least if I have to let go of one part of me, I guess I want to keep one part true to myself. I want to just be me. I wouldn't want to be related to a mice, but I feel like mice, how they're always hiding. They going around silently. Quickly. Yeah, my head has been on a swivel 24, 7.

If you're in DC, don't come down New York Avenue to get on the Beltway because they have a big ass checkpoint.

Hey, man, they got a police checkpoint on A Street.

14Th street is crawling with ice.

Some people have developed warning systems alerting people to what streets to avoid on neighborhood forums and social media. So on New York Avenue, ICE is there. Please be careful.

Watch what you're doing out here, everybody.

But sometimes there is no warning.

It was six in the morning and my brother, my mom and I, we all wake up to screaming.

Christopher is 18 years old. He grew up in Mount Pleasant in northwest DC. On the morning of August 21st, while it was still dark, he heard his dad yelling outside their apartment building.

And we look out the window and then we see three SUVs and people that were like, trying to grab my dad out of his work truck.

As soon as they see that his mom rushes down five flights of stairs to the scene.

I see my mom crying and like, what happened? What happened? And she immediately, like, yells at me. She was like, they took your dad. They took your dad. I'm like, what?

She said the Men sprang out of unmarked SUVs dressed in plain clothes, no uniforms, and they grabbed his dad just as he was about to get into his work truck.

And she heard, like, a big oomph. What I'm guessing is that they knocked the wind out of him because apparently there was, like, four people on top of him. And then just threw him in one of the SUVs, and they drove off. And then I rushed to his truck because his truck is, like, in the middle of the street. It's turned on.

His father works in construction just outside the city. He's a scaffolder. Christopher opens the truck door to try to look for clues as to what happened.

It was still running. And I look inside. It's empty.

His dad's uniform and some bottles of water were there, along with his phone. The keys were left dangling in the ignition. So Christopher parks the car.

I was kind of, like, panicking a little bit. I could definitely hear my heart beating. I started thinking, like, okay, who could these people possibly be? Because they had nothing. They had no vest. Their vehicles were unmarked. Nothing. I thought he was being kidnapped.

About a half hour later, MPD arrives. A neighbor who had heard the screams had called 911.

And then the police officer came up. He was like, yeah, I think I have an idea what happened, because immigration enforcement is going around doing their patrols. They were usually going around in the mornings, like, early mornings. A bunch of people, at least from my community, they wake up early to go to their jobs. So I think that that's who took your dad.

Christopher explained to the police that his dad had temporary protected status. He'd been living here for the past 20 years after arriving from El Salvador. So if it had been ice, there had to be some kind of mistake.

They told me that they couldn't do anything because they're a separate agency, that the police department couldn't really do much about it. They just said that if you have any, like, questions, like, visit the Immigration enforcement website to put in his A number in case he's a KS already on his file.

An A number is an alien number. Anyone who's a non citizen is assigned one by dhs.

Then he said, sorry, I couldn't help, and then he just left.

In all likelihood, it seemed to Christopher his dad was taken by ice, but even the police couldn't say for sure. So you still didn't know where he was?

No. Then I get a call from a random number from my dad's phone.

See?

And I hear my dad's voice. He's like, he's like, son, I'm like.

Dad, where are you?

What happened?

And ask her, I don't know that guy. I don't know. The police ice.

As he's riding in the back of the car, Christopher's dad was also trying to figure out who had taken him.

And I cried and I say, you know, help me, help me.

Because.

Because they don't have no badge number, or they say, it's police. Maybe these people gonna kill me. Something like that. Because I don't know. They just tell me, you know, you're illegal. You being arrested because you're illegal. And I say, I'm not illegal.

I got paper.

They don't listen. They don't listen to me.

It's only then that he starts to understand. And that's what he tells Christopher.

He was like, everything's okay. They're just detaining me. And as soon as I heard the word detainment, I just thought to myself, like, oh, my goodness, I just detained him.

I'd be crying because you never think they're going to happen you maybe later, my family be the same way.

In that moment, whatever was happening to you, you were worried they were going to come back for your family.

Yeah, because, you know, they look Spanish, too, like me, you know.

When Christopher's dad, Jose, arrives at the Icefield office in Chantilly, Virginia, they take his wallet where his papers are.

I say, I'm legal. I'm good. I got paper.

They say, no, but he says, they don't listen. He's processed into a holding room with what he described as 65 other people just like him. All say they've been swept up from D.C. some with papers, some without. He told me there were so many people on the floor, no one could lie down fully to sleep. So people just stood like an animal.

You know, because you can sleep.

We've talked to a lawyer and other families whose loved ones had been detained. They paint a similar picture to the one Christopher's dad did. Crowded. Some were given a foil blanket and a single burrito for the day. Do you talk to anyone inside?

Yes, like normal people, you know, they go to work. Like me.

They were on their way to work. Yes, like me, Christopher's dad was there for hours. He began to worry that this was the start of a wrongful deportation. At the first chance he could, he called his son.

My dad's phone, it rings. It's from a detention center. When I pick up, I hear my dad.

What I do is call my son, you know, and say, where I am.

And he's like, mijo, son. I'm like, hey, dad, where you at?

I've been right now in Chantilles. I tell my son, looking for lawyer.

And he was just telling me, please find a lawyer quick, because they might move him.

Well, I made sure they not report me to El Salvador.

And then once he hung up, we were like, okay, we gotta go find people. My cousin and I, we were driving throughout the entire D.C. area trying to find lawyers. So the first stop, the second stop, I think it was around northeast, northwest, southwest. Like between the border of southwest and northwest. We asked for the lawyer. They're like, I don't know if we can, because we're booked up. Hey, yeah, we're booked up. We're doing it as fast as we can. We're looking everywhere. We can't really help you. The schedule's filled up. We're opening doors left and right to see who's available because everyone showed us that she was in surgery at the time. They gave us, like, a list of recommended lawyers, and we called them. All the lawyers around the area are like, same problem. Like, hey, they're full. We're booked up. We can. It's a bunch of people who are being detained by ICE until we find this one lawyer.

And this is after how many lawyers you've hit up?

She's the eighth one. And then she was like, yeah, we could set up a meeting, like, around next week.

The next morning, the lawyer called to say that there was a cancelation. So he immediately took the open spot.

We were going through my dad's papers. 20 minutes after the meeting started, I get a call from dhs. Like the name was called DHS ice.

He got news that his dad had been moved elsewhere in Virginia to Richmond.

When they taking me to Rizmo, the first thing I see the one, the big guy supervisor. And the supervisor asked, where's Christopher, Daddy? And I said, I am. He said, I don't understand why you be arrest. They don't supposed to take you because you got paper, you're good. And he said, I'm sorry. Very sorry for that. When they tell me that. And I cried because you think never gonna see people like him talking nice and say, you good. You're illegal here. You said, sorry.

I'm sorry.

You know, I feel good. At that moment, the guy, the supervisor said, hey, man, don't cry, man. Everything's gonna be okay. He said, you asked somebody to pick up you? I said, yeah, my son.

And then we started rushing out to go into the car to go pick him up. I just hear my mom crying. She's like, thank the Lord. Thank God that it happened.

And my son cried, too. You know, my wife, everybody cried that moment. And I cried, too.

When we asked the Department of Homeland Security about what Christopher and his dad told us, they refuted their account. They said ICE agents clearly identify themselves as law enforcement, including by wearing the proper identifying clothing. They also said that their agents are trained to ask a series of questions to determine a person's status and if arrest is needed, to use the minimum possible force. And lastly, they denied the conditions in Chantilly, saying that detainees have access to phones, legal representation, and three meals a day. Their goal, they said, is to support the re establishment of law and order in public safety so Americans can feel safe in our nation's capital. Even though Christopher got his dad back, things feel different now. His mom stopped going to work. His dad sends Christopher out for errands, and he tells his son to have his passport on him at all times because they're not ruling out that this could all happen again.

I mean, I'm not sure if it's even in the system that he was even detained, because we looked again and there were still zero cases with his. A number. Very worried that it could happen again.

When I go to work, go to a house, I look around like, you scared everybody. You know what I mean? I scared for everything.

Yeah, you're scared every day, people looking for you.

Sometime when I. When I go to work, I'm tripped. The guy is behind me, but it's not bad. But I feel something like that sometimes. When I go to work, I feel. I feel the same. I feel that day all the time. That thing is in my head that's still right there in my head.

The future of federal troops and agents in D.C. remain uncertain. Over the past week, the city's leaders sent conflicting signals. Mayor Bowser issued an order requiring local police to continue working with most federal agencies, excluding ice, indefinitely. But a few days later, the city's attorney general sued the Trump administration over the deployment of the National Guard, calling it an illegal military occupation. Over the weekend, Trump signaled that the next target for a strategy would be Chicago. In a social media post on Saturday, he published a Photoshopped image of the Chicago skyline filled with military helicopters and billowing flames. Invoking the new name he's given to the Department of Defense, Trump wrote, quote, chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of War. Hey, Chicago, standard ground. Hey, Chicago, stand your ground.

They will never break us down.

They will never break us down. That prompted thousands of residents in Chicago to take to the city's streets a few hours later to protest Trump's threat to do to Chicago what they've already seen him do to Washington, D.C.

We'Ll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Sunday, the US And South Korea RA reached a deal to release hundreds of Korean citizens who were detained in one of the largest immigration raids of Trump's second term on a Hyundai Motor plant in Georgia. The surprise raid resulted in the detention of around 300 South Korean citizens who U.S. officials allege had overstayed their visas or had entered the country through a visa program that had barred them from working. The raid has shocked South Korea, a close US Ally and trading partner, as well as Hyundai, which has promised to expand its manufacturing in the US and it demonstrated just how wide ranging Trump's immigration crackdown has now become. Today's episode was reported and produced by Jessica Chung with help from Carlos Prieto and Mary Wilson. It was edited by Lindsay Garrison, Lexi Diao and Michael Benoit, fact checked by Sharmila Venkatasubin with help from Susan Lee, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the Daily I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.