Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Sunday that authorities arrested 68 people overnight in Washington, D.C., amid a federal crackdown on crime in which President Trump has sent the National Guard to the nation’s capital and federalized the police force.
“Over 300 arrests in D.C. — and counting: Just last night, our federal and DC law enforcement partners made 68 arrests and seized 15 illegal firearms,” Bondi said in a post on the social platform X. ”Homicide suspects, drug traffickers, and more are being charged. I’ll continue to stand with you as we make DC safe again!”
Trump last week said he would take federal control of D.C.’s police department and deploy the National Guard to the city. The president’s moves have drawn heavy blowback from Democrats and D.C. residents.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who also recently compared the nation’s capital to multiple foreign war zones, said in a post on X that “graffiti is coming down in Washington, DC.”
“Graffiti left untouched to scar public spaces is the visual declaration of a society’s surrender,” Miller said in his Sunday post.
On Sunday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) dismissed Trump’s recent crackdown on the nation’s capital as a “stunt” and suggested, like other Democrats, that the effort is meant to distract from other events in the news.
“What’s happening here in Washington, D.C., is just a stunt. Donald Trump didn’t like the fact that the walls were closing in on him, that his own base was questioning why he wouldn’t release the Epstein files, why he was protecting very powerful people,” Murphy told NBC News’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press.”
“He didn’t want to talk anymore about the fact that our health care system is about to collapse because of the cuts that they have made, that premiums are going to go up by 75 percent on Americans,” the Connecticut senator added.
But Republicans and the administration have argued the federal crackdown is a necessary step given high murder and crime rates in D.C., while suggesting that Democrats running cities have done a poor job handling the issue.
A White House official told The Hill’s sister network NewsNation Sunday that the Saturday night D.C. law enforcement operations involved 1,800 participants and that the National Guard was “not making arrests at this time.”
This story was updated at 4:57 p.m.
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