President Trump on Monday announced that he is invoking Section 740 of the DC Home Rule Act to place Washington, DC’s Metropolitan Police Department under “direct federal control” and authorizing the Secretary of Defense to deploy National Guard troops in Washington, DC.
Section 740 of the DC Home Rule Act allows the President to take control of the Metropolitan Police Department under “special conditions of an emergency nature.”
The President signed two executive actions on Monday, including invoking powers under section 740 and sending statutorily required letters to the DC Mayor and the necessary congressional committees. Section 740 requires the President to notify committee chairmen and the mayor in order to federalize the Metropolitan police for more than forty-eight hours.
He also signed a Presidential memorandum directing the Secretary of Defense to utilize National Guard troops to clean up DC and authorizing state governors to use their National Guard troops at home. “We will bring in the military if it’s needed,” Trump told reporters.
“We’re formally declaring a public safety emergency. This is an emergency. This is a tragic emergency, and it’s embarrassing,” Trump said.
“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 we’ll deploy officers across the district with an overwhelming presence.”
Trump also said he will be working with Republicans in Congress to change the statutes to get rid of no cash bail and “some of the other things” that empower criminals in DC and other major cities across the nation.
The President designated Terry Cole as the interim federal commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Department to lead the federal takeover of the District.
President Trump was joined for the announcement by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and US Attorney Jeanine Pirro.
WATCH:
Trump: This is Liberation Day in DC, and we’re going to take our capital back. 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—you know what that is—and placing the DC Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control. And you’ll be meeting the people that will be directly involved with that. Very good people, but they’re tough, and they know what’s happening. They’ve done it before. In addition, I’m deploying the National Guard to help re-establish law, order, and public safety in Washington, DC, and they’re going to be allowed to do their job properly. And you people are victims of it too. You know, you’re reporters, and I understand a lot of you tend to be on the liberal side, but you don’t want to get mugged and raped and shot and killed. And you all know people and friends of yours that that happened.
And so, you can be anything you want, but you want to have safety in the streets. You want to 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. The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth— much higher. This is much higher. The number of car thefts has doubled over the past five years, and the number of carjackings has more than tripled. Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever. They say 25 years, but they don’t know what that means, because it just goes back 25 years— can’t be 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 just like we did on our southern border. Nobody comes to our southern border anymore. Three months in a row, we had zero. I don’t know if that’s right, but the people that do the work, it’s a very liberal group of people actually, they actually said zero for the last three months. Nobody thought a thing like that was possible. And, you know, when you say take a look at numbers, I just saw some charts. These are different cities throughout the world. The red is a place called Washington, DC. Just look at these. Baghdad is, we doubled up on Baghdad. Panama City, Brasilia, San Jose, Costa Rica, Bogota, Colombia, heavy drugs. Mexico City. I mentioned Lima, Peru, double and triple.
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