As hundreds of federal law enforcement officers and National Guard troops descend on Washington as part of President Donald Trump’s public display of force against crime in the nation’s capital, the president and his allies have increasingly directed their ire toward the city’s juvenile crime laws.
More than two weeks after a 19-year-old former DOGE staffer was allegedly assaulted in DC by a group of teens, the president suggested that decades of Democratic leadership in the district were to blame for a system that seems to let violent juvenile offenders off the hook.
Youth arrests reached a post-pandemic high in 2023, before falling the following year, according to DC government statistics. But from January 2025 until the end of June, DC Metropolitan police had arrested juveniles at the highest rate in that time period since 2019.
“Local ‘youths’ and gang members, some only 14, 15, and 16-years-old, are randomly attacking, mugging, maiming, and shooting innocent Citizens, at the same time knowing that they will be almost immediately released,” Trump said on Truth Social earlier this month. “The Law in DC must be changed to prosecute these ‘minors’ as adults, and lock them up for a long time, starting at age 14.”
Trump and US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro’s criticism of DC’s juvenile justice system highlights a longstanding rift between the US attorney’s office and that of the DC attorney general, which prosecutes juvenile offenses in the district.
The district’s current laws don’t allow juvenile offenders younger than 15 to be prosecuted as adults in the vast majority of cases. But offenders under 18 can still end up in the adult justice system in one of two ways. Federal prosecutors from the DC US attorney’s office can unilaterally charge 16 and 17-year-olds as adults when facing four of the most serious criminal charges on the books: murder, sexual assault, armed robbery, and assault with conspiracy to commit the three offenses.
Alternatively, the district’s attorney general’s office – which has jurisdiction over most juvenile crimes – can petition a judge to charge juvenile offenders 15 and up as adults but must prove that the defendant lacks “reasonable prospects for rehabilitation” in the juvenile system.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the DC attorney general’s office touted the office’s prosecution rates for violent juvenile offenses, writing that the office “prosecutes all serious and violent crimes committed by juveniles where we have the evidence required to do so, and we seek to hold young people accountable if they harm others.”
Pirro targeting three laws
Trump ally Pirro, who was confirmed this month as US Attorney for DC, has targeted three laws to change or overturn.
The top DC federal prosecutor last week attacked the district’s 2018 Youth Rehabilitation Act, which was enacted to “separate youth offenders from more mature, experienced offenders,” citing the case of a 19-year-old who shot another Metrobus passenger and was sentenced to probation under the act. The law raised the upper age limit of juvenile offenders for sentencing purposes from 22 to 24 in 2018 – and permits judges to seal convictions after offenders serve their sentences, except in cases of homicide and sexual abuse.
Pirro similarly criticized the 2021 Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act, which lets all offenders convicted before age 25 to ask for a sentencing reduction after serving 15 years in prison. The law requires judges to evaluate 11 factors – ranging from the defendant’s own childhood abuse history and mental health evaluations to victims’ statements – in determining whether the petitioner poses a danger to any community member, and that the “interests of justice” warrant a sentence modification.
“I know evil when I see it, no matter the age – and the violence in DC committed by young people belongs in criminal court, not family court,” Pirro said in a statement to CNN. “We’re not dealing with kids who need a pat on the back – we’re dealing with a wave of brutal violence that demands a serious response. While others debate causes, families are burying loved ones, and the only way to stop this is to treat violent offenders like the criminals they are.”
She also claimed that the 2022 Second Chance Amendment Act allows for the “stunning erasure of criminal convictions” by allowing all defendants to move for certain criminal convictions to be sealed or expunged.
Some criminal justice experts and local officials say that Trump and Pirro’s vision for DC is out-of-date and harkens back to the rhetoric of historic crime waves in the 1990s.
Compared to their counterparts at the US attorney’s office, the DC attorney general’s office “is much more grounded in research about what works and what doesn’t work and about what is developmentally appropriate,” said Eduardo Ferrer, an associate professor of law and policy director of the Juvenile Justice Initiative at Georgetown University.
“I’m not prepared to just throw away the key on our young people, and most people are not,” said DC Councilmember Christina Henderson, adding that she believes that attacks largely ignore the complexities of the city’s justice system. “I feel strongly that the district should be able to make that decision for themselves, because these are our kids.”
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