Trump Admin Beats Hasty Retreat On DC Police Order

DOJ seems leery of another contempt order.

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” the president ranted last week.

It has not. Violent crime in DC is down sharply from last year, and is, in fact, at a 30-year low. But one of the teenage DOGE-bros — that odious little shit Edward “Big Balls” Coristine — got mugged a couple weeks ago. And that was just the Reichstag-fire-but-dumber excuse the Trump administration needed to invoke emergency powers to seize control of DC’s police.

On August 11, Trump declared a “Crime Emergency in the District of Columbia” in which he purported to take over the entire Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) “for Federal purposes, including maintaining law and order in the Nation’s seat of Government; protecting Federal buildings, national monuments, and other Federal property; and ensuring conditions necessary for the orderly functioning of the Federal Government.” This was followed up by Order 6370-2025 from Attorney General Pam Bondi, purporting to cancel all of the MPD’s “sanctuary city” orders and putting “Terrence Cole,” the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, in charge of the MPD. (His name is Terrance Cole, but why should the AG bother to learn the names of her underlings, right?)

How this will save Coristine’s balls was left as an exercise for the reader.

The City immediately sued and sought a temporary injunction blocking the order, and, after a hearing before Judge Ana Reyes on Friday afternoon, the Trump administration largely backed down.

But the whole episode is a reminder of the precarious situation the more than 700,000 residents of our nation’s capital live under as citizens of no state.

Taxation without representation

In 1790, the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom(?) located the nation’s capital in the swampy armpit of the Potomac River. To assure the existing thirteen states that one of their number was not about to reap a fantastic bounty by hosting the seat of federal government, Washington would be an independent district governed directly by Congress itself. That’s Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the Constitution, also known as the “Enclave Clause.”

At the time, that wasn’t necessarily the craziest idea — Congress was only a part-time gig in those days, and the city was home to far fewer than the 50,000 residents needed to admit a state. But within a few decades it became clear that this jury-rigged solution wasn’t going to work long term.

DC government has gone through multiple instantiations since then, several of which were very weird. Between 1874 and 1967, it was governed by a tripartite system consisting of three “commissioners,” two appointed by the president and one by the Army Corps of Engineers. But it was Congress which drafted the city’s laws and funded local government, meaning that US Senators and Representatives from other states were left fielding calls from DC residents about everything from potholes, to trash pickup, to enforcing local leash laws. Members of Congress, answerable only to their own constituents, were largely indifferent to complaints by DC residents. For example, Congress frequently forgot to authorize daylight savings time in DC, leaving the District’s residents in a weird Twilight Zone, an hour behind everyone else on the East coast.

Finally in 1973, Congress enacted the Home Rule Act, ceding a little of its powers over DC to local citizens. Residents gained the right to elect a mayor and city council to manage the District’s day-to-day affairs, but Congress retained ultimate authority to approve local laws and set the city’s budget. For good measure, Congress also devolved some of its authority over the city to the president for use in an emergency, which is why the city remains uniquely vulnerable to the depredations of President Emergency Powers.

Section 740

Because the federal government lacks its own police force, the Home Rule Act contains an obscure emergency provision at Section 740 empowering the president to conscript local police under certain conditions:

Whenever the President of the United States determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist which require the use of the Metropolitan Police force for Federal purposes, he may direct the Mayor to provide him, and the Mayor shall provide, such services of the Metropolitan Police force as the President may deem necessary and appropriate.

Until last week, no president had ever invoked Section 740, so there is no case law interpreting it. But the plain text of the statute sets three preconditions for the president’s invocation:

1. There must be “special conditions of an emergency nature” that require the assistance of the DC Metro police;

2. The President must “direct” the DC Mayor to provide police “services” in support of such emergency; and

3. Those services must be in support of a “federal purpose.”

Moreover, the powers authorized by Section 740 expire after just 48 hours, although they can be extended up to 30 days if the President notifies Congress in writing as to the “reason for such direction and the period of time during which the need for such services is likely to continue.” After 30 days, the emergency terminates “unless the Senate and the House of Representatives enact into law a joint resolution” extending the emergency.

Shout “Emergency!” Break the law. Rinse and repeat.

Pursuant to Section 740, AG Bondi issued her August 14 order purporting to:

1. Appoint DEA Administrator Cole as the “Emergency Police Commissioner” of MPD with all the powers of the Chief of Police;

2. Revoke three MPD orders regarding local police cooperation with immigration enforcement; and

3. Instruct the MPD to enforce “to the maximum extent permissible by law” local laws regarding the “unlawful occupancy of public spaces.”

Targeting homeless people is consistent with Trump’s yelling at clouds about “too many tents on the lawns — these magnificent lawns,” but would appear to have precious little to do with “special conditions of an emergency nature.” And so the very next morning, the District of Columbia raced into federal court seeking a temporary restraining order blocking Bondi’s order from going into effect.

They drew Judge Ana Reyes, last seen on these pages brutally eviscerating the government’s slipshod reasoning in support of the ban on trans service members. (But not too slipshod for SCOTUS). The judge promptly cancelled her upcoming vacation, postponed a pizza party for her departing law clerks, and scheduled a hearing on the District’s motion for later that afternoon.

Know when to fold ‘em

At the hearing, Judge Reyes gave the government the maximum benefit of the doubt. She refused to even discuss the issue of whether there was a genuine emergency sufficient to invoke Section 740, or whether the uses demanded by the president were in support of a “federal purpose.” Because DC requested an immediate temporary restraining order before the benefit of any discovery, Judge Reyes just assumed (for now) that the Trump administration had satisfied those preconditions.

And despite all of that, it was clear that Judge Reyes thought no part of the order was likely to survive as written. There is nothing in the Home Rule Act giving the president the power to unilaterally appoint a new Chief of Police or issue commands directly to the MPD. Nor does the Home Rule Act empower the president to rescind previous police directives; he can only order MPD to provide police “services.” So the administration can’t just wipe out the offending “sanctuary city” policies with the stroke of a pen — although it might be able to affirmatively order MPD to do things that violate those policies.

The court made it pellucidly clear that, if the administration didn’t walk back Bondi’s garbage demands, it was going to find itself on the pointy end of a TRO. And, as Judge Reyes reminded Deputy AG Yaakov Roth, the penalty for noncompliance with a judicial order is contempt of court. And so the government caved and agreed to rescind Bondi’s August 14 order, effectively stipulating to most of the city’s demands, and replacing it with Order 6372-2025, hammered out with DC’s Attorney General Brian Schwalb.

Under the new order, Cole is no longer denominated as Chief of Police, but rather the AG’s “designee” to the Mayor for the purposes of communicating requests made during the duration of the so-called “emergency.” (They’re still misspelling his name, though!) And the balance of the order now requests affirmative “assistance” from MPD with the enforcement of federal immigration law, rather than unilateral rescission of its own internal edicts. AG Schwalb then withdrew his request for a TRO, and everyone got to go home for the weekend.

But DC isn’t out of the woods yet. As Judge Reyes noted during the hearing, the Home Rule Act does give the administration special powers over MPD. The Act says that the Mayor “must” provide the police services that the President deems “necessary and appropriate.” And so, even though this particular order was overbroad, the government almost certainly can order DC Mayor Muriel Bowser to provide local police support for ICE raids if Section 740 of the Home Rule Act has been properly invoked.

Of course the original lawsuit remains pending, even after the District’s motion for TRO was withdrawn. The court will still have to decide whether there’s a legitimate “emergency” for the purposes of Section 740, and whether enforcing DC’s vagrancy laws have a federal purpose. And meanwhile, the 30-day clock is ticking — something the administration will surely cite as a reason to evade judicial review by an unfriendly judge. Can’t have a lot of fact-finding about whether there’s an “emergency” if the emergency order has expired, right? (No, not right.)

TL, DR?

DC should be a state. It has more residents than Wyoming or Vermont, and arguments that its citizens are undeserving of representation amount to a naked power grab wrapped in gutter racism. But until that day comes, DC residents should at least be able to run their own police department. And for now, they still can.