“You look at Chicago, you look at Los Angeles, and we have other cities that are very bad,” said President Donald Trump during a Monday press conference when he announced plans for a federal takeover of Washington D.C. “New York has a problem, and of course you have Baltimore and Oakland.”
While there is some room for a temporary takeover of the nation’s capital, experts note that there are limitations when it comes to any plans to take other U.S. cities. Here’s what we know.
Trump said “the local government of the District of Columbia has lost control of public order and safety in the city,” citing the case of two Israeli embassy staffers murdered in May, a Congressional staffer who was shot and killed and a Trump administration staffer who was recently beaten. He said that he directed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to “mobilize the District of Columbia National Guard and order members to active service, in such numbers as he deems necessary, to address the epidemic of crime in our Nation’s capital.”
Furthermore, Trump said he directed Hegseth to “coordinate with State Governors and authorize the orders of any additional members of the National Guard to active service, as he deems necessary and appropriate, to augment this mission.”
According to Bloomberg, Trump would need an act of Congress to get total control of Washington D.C., as it is covered by a Home Rule Charter. Audacy station KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, Pa., noted that Washington’s Home Rule Charter allows the president to take over the police department for up to 30 days, in the case of an emergency. However, despite the claims Trump and Vice President JD Vance have made about crime in the capital, including comparing the crime rate to cities abroad, Claire Finkelstein – founder and faculty director of Penn Law’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law – said there “doesn’t appear to be an actual emergency,” in D.C., per KYW.
In fact, the U.S. State’s Attorney for the District of Columbia reported at the start of this year that 2024 marked a 30-year low in violent crime there, with rates down 35% from 2023 alone. Crimes rates across the country dropped last year, according to data recently released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and crime rates have actually been dropping in many of the major cities Trump mentioned, including New York, N.Y.; Los Angeles, Calif., and Chicago, Ill.
“We are starting very strongly with D.C., we are going to clean it up real quickly, as they say,” said Trump. He also criticized Democratic-run cities implementing no cash bail: “By the way every place in the country where there is no cash bail is a disaster,” the president said, adding that he plans to end it in Chicago.
CBS News Chicago Legal Analyst Irv Miller said that the chances that Trump will be able to reverse cash bail in Illinois are “near nil,” according to the outlet.
Indeed, Craig Green, Temple University professor and chair of law and government said “there’s no authority and, indeed, there’s a constitutional principle preventing him from taking control of state and local officials,” of the president. Still, Green and Finkelstein said Philadelphia and other cities “should be preparing for the Trump administration to try to seize control, given the president’s remarks,” KYW reported.
“The courts have not thus far stood up and drawn lines and said no further than this, but I have to think they would if he tried to do something like that in Philadelphia or Seattle or Chicago,” Green explained.
Finkelstein noted that “the fact that something is not legal doesn’t mean the president won’t do it,” and that the conservative-leaning Supreme Court could side with Trump. KYW also said that city and state lawsuits could be lengthy and unpredictable and that federal takeovers of major cities could spark protests, which could be used as a pretext for more federal control.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions and deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles were already met with protests in Los Angeles this year. Local officials blamed federal agents for inciting the protests and riots, Audacy reported.
“For all the talk Republicans give about giving their localities their rights, where are they now?’ said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in a Monday X post. “If this was anything other than a political ploy and attempted distraction from Trump’s other scandals, if he actually cared about the people of DC, he’d demand the House finally release the billion dollars of DC’s funding they’ve been sitting on for months.”