With Trump’s Takeover, Washington Finds a Mission to Resist

To those who have never lived in the 68 square miles of Washington, the nation’s capital can seem to lack an authentic residential and cultural identity. Transient populations come and go with alternating administrations.

Ordinary life proceeds in the shadows of the White House, monuments and the Capitol dome. Even the sports teams can struggle to rally fans.

But the recent deployment of hundreds of often masked federal agents and hundreds more National Guard troops have brought many Washingtonians a sense of shared purpose: outrage.

“We are not against fighting crime,” said Tony Guardad, a 49-year-old construction worker, who emphasized that he is not against the police. “But we are against boots on the street, and we don’t want to feel like we are in North Korea.”

Ty Hobson-Powell, a community organizer and author who was born in Washington, called it “a shared sense of opposition.”

Since President Trump declared a “crime emergency” in Washington and ordered federal law enforcement agents to deploy to the capital on Aug. 7, they have set up checkpoints, evicted homeless people from the streets, pulled people over for minor infractions such as open alcohol containers, and sometimes asked drivers for their immigration status.

Mr. Trump said on Friday that the nation’s capital “will be one of the safest places anywhere on earth.”

But if he was expecting public displays of gratitude, he hasn’t found them. Instead, agents and guardsmen have been met with spirited dissent. Senior administration officials have been booed and heckled. Federal agents have been dogged by camera-wielding Washingtonians who have put encounter after encounter on social media.

Protesters have chanted at the White House, banged on pots and pans, and serenaded agents and National Guard troops posted outside Union Station with “The Imperial March” from the movie “Star Wars,” also known as the theme song for Darth Vader and his Stormtroopers.

Opponents have tried to break up arrests in one neighborhood, Columbia Heights, where Central American immigrants have long lived. A former Justice Department employee who threw a sandwich at a federal agent has become a folk hero, his image lighting up the cityscape. Calls for District of Columbia’s statehood, which have ebbed and flowed for decades, have crescendoed as Washingtonians wrestled with their lack of formal power over what many see as a capricious commander in chief.

“I’ve been heartened to see Democrats saying they want nothing less than D.C. statehood,” said Akash Bobba, a 22-year-old Washington resident who works as a civil rights advocate and data analyst. “That wasn’t something that was being talked about so much before.”

When Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and a White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, strolled through Union Station on Wednesday to pose with guardsmen at a Shake Shack, they were met with epithets and jeers.

“You’re an embarrassment to Ohio,” someone in the crowd shouted at the vice president, a reference to his home state. It was one of the tamer insults.

Mr. Miller seemed to suggest the taunts would only spur more enforcement efforts.

“I’m glad they’re here today,” Mr. Miller said of the hecklers, “because me, Pete and the vice president are all going to leave here and, inspired by them, we’re going to add thousands more resources to this city.”

The protesters, he said, were “elderly white hippies” standing in the way of law enforcement officers protecting a majority Black city.

In fact, protesters have come from a cross section of Washington and its suburbs, and while the District has many Black leaders, including Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, the heavily gentrified city is about 41 percent Black, according to U.S. census data. Its 285,810 Black residents are now nearly matched by its 273,194 white residents.

And because of its unique concentration of political think tanks, union headquarters, nonprofit organizations, lobbying outfits and international development banks, Washington is full of people with plenty of experience organizing and generating outrage.

“Whether it’s fear or something else, people are just not coming out in the numbers we need them to,” she said.

Some of the most vulnerable residents said they did feel safer with the federal agents around. James Abraham, a homeless man who was sitting on a street corner in the U Street Corridor, one of the most heavily policed entertainment districts, said he was initially leery when federal authorities began patrolling Washington.

But he said he feels “a lot better with them being around than not being around,” noting he and other members of the homeless community have been targets of violence and theft, especially with intoxicated revelers in the city’s nightlife hubs.

Despite Mr. Miller’s assertion about “white hippies,” people of color have been involved in the protests, many of which have taken place in neighborhoods with larger white populations where federal forces had drawn attention.

Meanwhile, residents in the higher crime neighborhoods that Mr. Miller claimed are under federal protection have expressed skepticism and suspicion of the president’s motives. Leaders in Ward 7, a largely Black area of Washington that has seen high crime in the past, convened residents on Friday night to relieve the concerns of the shaken community.

“This is what I would call the Emmett Till era,” said Cora Masters Barry, the widow of the city’s longtime mayor, Marion Barry. “The Emmett Till era is the era where racism, oppression and violence is state-sanctioned,” she said, and there was “no redress” when “Black folks were disappearing all over the place.”

She found a receptive audience. Many expressed fear and confusion as they lamented stricter scrutiny from law enforcement and sought answers to how they should navigate the surge in officers.

“We don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong,” said Kiera Meade, a resident of Trenton Park, in nearby Ward 8. Ms. Meade, 33, described the officers as “more hostile than usual,” as they approached pedestrians on the sidewalk and outside residents’ homes.

Some of the young audience members said they were told to avoid wearing dark or black clothing.

“Always carry your ID,” said Tony Lewis Jr., a local activist. “And if you get pulled over, roll all your windows down.”

“This is not about tucking your tail, it’s about being strategic,” he added.

The “resistance” is often generated by the Free DC movement, a Washington statehood group that re-emerged after Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January.

The movement is behind nightly pot-banging gatherings. The group started a chant — “Free D.C.!” — at the 51st minute (for the 51st state) of the games of the Washington Spirit, the city’s professional woman’s soccer team. At one recent game, the crowd erupted so loudly the public address announcer stopped speaking.

“Everyone now understands that we are all D.C.,” said Keya Chatterjee, the executive director of Free D.C. She added that Washingtonians must “come together and stop this attack and occupation.”

Washingtonians are not some “random group of people,” she said. “We are people who love our neighborhoods.”

Mr. Hobson-Powell, the community organizer, said Washingtonians, not the Trump administration, should help decide how to address the city’s public safety issues. He said he had lost friends in Washington to gun violence, but what a lot of what he is seeing “is pure intimidation.”

Earlier this month, he watched nearly a dozen officers pull over a driver on a main street for what he said was no apparent reason. Mr. Hobson-Powell pulled out his phone and began to film the encounter until the officers left.

“I shamed them into leaving the guy alone,” he said.

On Friday afternoon, protesters gathered in Columbia Heights before marching down to the corner of 14th and U Streets, the corridor where much of the anti-takeover pushback has come from.

Mr. Guardad, the construction worker, said he was initially called to action after the Trump administration began deporting people to El Salvador.

“Now, people in the immigrant community, if there’s an emergency, they are afraid to contact 911, because now they do believe that the police are working with ICE,” he said.

But he has been heartened by the protesters confronting agents and using smartphones to record videos of enforcement actions.

John-Paul Perrotta said he looks at the military presence in Washington and doesn’t recognize his city.

“People are feeling scared to even go to church, kids are afraid to go outside,” said Mr. Perrotta, a 27-year-old schoolteacher. He is worried that some parents will be too afraid to bring their children to school this week when summer break ends.

“America as we know it is going to look very different,” he said. “I fear for the other cities in this country that may be next.”