Tag Archives: White House
Washington Post: ‘Nowhere to go’: What happened after Trump ordered homeless encampments cleared
The White House said 50 homeless encampments in D.C. have been cleared in recent weeks and more action is forthcoming.
The lights of half a dozen police cars bounced off buildings and the faces of 50 or so homeless adults as federal and D.C. officers lined up outside New York Avenue Presbyterian Church two blocks east of the White House.
Joyce Baucom leaned on her metal cane, knees still unsteady from a double replacement years earlier, and ducked under a tree to shelter from the rain.
Her 5-year-old Chihuahua-pit bull mix, Lil Mama, barked at nearby police officers until her body quaked.
Baucom and her 40-year-old son have been living on the streets for about a year, most recently near the church, a longtime safe harbor that serves the nearly 800 people living unsheltered on the streets of the nation’s capital, according to an annual count by the city. That night, a week into President Donald Trump’s takeover of law enforcement in the District, no one would be allowed to sleep nearby.
“You’re going to have to remove your things, okay?” a city worker told the crowd.
Lil Mama’s barks grew louder.
“Right now!” another city worker yelled over the dog.
The clearing that took place outside the church Aug. 18 was one of 50 that White House officials said this week have been executed by multiagency teams since Trump declared a crime emergency in D.C. on Aug. 11, ordered federal agents to patrol the streets and warned unhoused residents that they “have to move out, IMMEDIATELY.”
Trump’s scrutiny of street homelessness in the District has mobilized advocates, community members and even D.C. officials to open up additional shelter beds. But for many unhoused Washingtonians, the federal crackdown this month has felt more like a continuation of Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s years-long push to remove visible homelessness from the city’s downtown — only now at an accelerated pace and backed by federal manpower.
The president’s crusade has crashed against the same reality that for years has derailed attempts to solve the city’s homelessness crisis: There are not enough services, subsidies or beds to house the thousands of adults and children in the District without permanent housing. Men and women pushed out of encampments by federal law enforcement this month told The Washington Post they have scrambled to find somewhere else to go. Some spent a night or two in a hotel, others in an emergency room. But most simply picked up their belongings and moved to another street corner, another patch of trees, another neighborhood, where they hoped federal agents would pass them by.
Baucom, a D.C. native and former custodian who spent years cleaning government buildings, has passed many nights along with her son and Lil Mama outside the church on New York Avenue — sometimes sleeping right on the concrete steps. The church is a day center for the unsheltered, a place where people can find regular meals, bathrooms, showers and case workers. But when the doors close at 5 p.m., many spend their nights in nearby alleys, on park benches or the church’s small triangle of grass.
As officers closed in around her, Baucom raised her voice to be heard over Lil Mama’s barking.
“Why y’all not giving me housing or putting me up in a hotel?” she said. “There’s nowhere to go.”
By the time the Trump administration directed law enforcement to remove homeless people from the nation’s capital, many of the District’s most prominent encampments had long been cleared by city or federal officials.
Since 2021, hundreds of homeless people have been forced to pack up and leave amid widespread clearings that dismantled the largest tent encampments in D.C. — under the NoMa overpass, on New Jersey Avenue, in parks near Union Station and blocks away from the White House — as well as countless small ones that consisted of one or two tents. D.C. officials have said the large encampments were unsanitary and made passersby and nearby business owners feel unsafe.
But forcing homeless individuals to move from site to site impedes their ability to get help and get housed, advocates and caseworkers have said. Belongings, important documents and even phones can get lost in the shuffle of an eviction. Moving to a different part of the city can mean crossing into the jurisdiction of a different nonprofit and force a restart of the outreach process with new case managers.
Shelley Byars, 47, has lived in nearly a dozen spots around the District in the past two years.
Although she has been approved for the Permanent Supportive Voucher program since July 2022, Byars was one of about 75 people who lived in McPherson Square until the National Park Service forcibly evicted them in early 2023. Since then, she has bounced around.
When Trump’s crackdown began, Byars had been living just outside George Washington Circle, a small park in Foggy Bottom that has at its center an equestrian statue of the nation’s first president. When federal agents last week instructed the homeless residents living there to clear out, Byars packed up her bags and moved — again.
“I mean what can I do about it?” Byars said recently, shrugging as she stood in line for a meal from Catholic volunteers. “Just more of the same.”
The Trump administration has threatened to fine or arrest those who refuse to move or go to a shelter. The White House said this week that of the people at the 50 encampments cleared by multiagency teams since the federal takeover began, two individuals were arrested; both were accused of assaulting police. The White House did not provide names or details on the incidents.
“President Trump is cleaning up D.C. to make it safe for all residents and visitors while ensuring homeless individuals aren’t out on the streets putting themselves at risk or posing a risk to others,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to The Post. “Homeless people will have the opportunity to be taken to a homeless shelter or receive addiction and mental health services. This will make D.C. safer and cleaner for everyone.”
Byars landed last week next to an old neighbor: Daniel Kingery, a 64-year-old man who lived for years in the McPherson Square encampment.
Kingery doesn’t have a tent. He sleeps on a cart he has constructed to display political messages and challenges to authority.
He abhors what he sees as the criminalization of homelessness and, in 2023, refused to leave McPherson Square when police officers encircled the park and closed off its entry points. He was arrested and spent several weeks in jail.
Many of the city’s chronically unhoused residents who choose to live on the street do so because they have determined that shelters don’t work for them. Advocates call the main drivers of this “the four P’s”: property, partners, pets and, most recently, pandemic. Most of the city’s shelters are not able to accommodate opposite-sex partners, pets or many personal belongings. Following the coronavirus pandemic, many unhoused people became more leery of living in the close confines of congregate shelters.
Baucom had several reasons for sleeping on the street outside New York Avenue Presbyterian instead of in a shelter: There was Lil Mama. There were the half-dozen bags she carries with her. And there was her adult son, Jonathan. He has kidney failure and needs frequent dialysis treatments.
“He can’t go into a shelter in his condition,” Baucom said.
Back near McPherson, Kingery keeps a watchful eye. Groups of police and National Guard members have approached him in recent days, he said, but have only issued verbal warnings, encouraging him to move.
He has declined.
A week and a half into the federal government’s takeover, Bowser (D) stood in the basement of a new low-barrier shelter near Union Station built to house up to 190 adults — the majority of whom, D.C. officials said, will be brought in off the street — in small dorm-style apartments. But it won’t open until after Trump’s 30-day federal emergency is set to expire.
In the immediate term, the District has made more space for people at the city’s already-crowded shelters, an approach typically reserved for cold-weather months when sleeping outside can have deadly consequences.
“Our message today, as it is every day, is that there is shelter space available in Washington, D.C., and we encourage everyone to come inside,” Bowser said at the news conference.
This week, Bowser said that 81 additional people had come into the shelter system since the push began. City staff and volunteers also planned to fan out across the city Thursday night to track the number of unhoused people on the District’s streets, Bowser and administration officials said.
A week and a half into the federal government’s takeover, Bowser (D) stood in the basement of a new low-barrier shelter near Union Station built to house up to 190 adults — the majority of whom, D.C. officials said, will be brought in off the street — in small dorm-style apartments. But it won’t open until after Trump’s 30-day federal emergency is set to expire.
In the immediate term, the District has made more space for people at the city’s already-crowded shelters, an approach typically reserved for cold-weather months when sleeping outside can have deadly consequences.
“Our message today, as it is every day, is that there is shelter space available in Washington, D.C., and we encourage everyone to come inside,” Bowser said at the news conference.
This week, Bowser said that 81 additional people had come into the shelter system since the push began. City staff and volunteers also planned to fan out across the city Thursday night to track the number of unhoused people on the District’s streets, Bowser and administration officials said.
For years, the city’s homeless population has been in decline. According to the 2025 Point-In-Time count, the annual federally mandated census of unhoused people, there were 5,138 unhoused individuals sleeping in shelters and on the streets in 2025 — a 9 percent dip from the previous year and a 19 percent drop since 2020, when 6,380 homeless people were recorded.
Rachel Pierre, the acting director of the D.C. Department of Human Services, said the city has expanded shelter capacity to meet demand and will continue to do so for the duration of the federal emergency. No one, she added, has been denied a shelter bed since Aug. 8.
“It is still not illegal to be homeless,” Bowser said. “You cannot have camps, you cannot have tents, but it is not illegal to be homeless.”
Advocates, who have pushed the District to open additional shelter capacity and redouble its outreach, have said the city is not doing enough to get unhoused individuals out of harm’s way.
At the start of the federal crackdown, community members in Ward 2, which encompasses most of downtown, began asking unhoused people what would “make them feel safer” as the federal government’s reach into the District grew. The most popular responses they got, according to Ward 2 Mutual Aid organizer Hadley Ashford, 29, were people asking for transit cards and help spending a few nights off the streets.
In less than a week, the group collected more than $5,200 and was able to move 20 people into hotel rooms for a couple of nights at a time. The majority of those the group helped, Ashford said, refused to move into a shelter because they didn’t want to have to separate from pets or partners or family members. At least one individual was immunocompromised and did not want to be in a crowded facility.
“We just wanted to get people out of harm’s way in the immediate term,” she said. “Regardless of how many donations we’re getting in, this is not something we can continue to do forever. … The city needs to do more; they’re not providing enough services.”
Homeless advocates and service providers in surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia have not seen the surge of homeless people many expected amid the federal crackdown in D.C.
ohn Mendez, executive director of Bethesda Cares, which does homeless outreach in Montgomery County, Maryland, said they’ve instead seen unhoused people relying on public transportation — to try to stay out of sight and away from where federal officers might be doing sweeps.
In recent days, Byars has been uneasy straying too far from her camp, just in case. She knows what happens when officials decide to remove an encampment: Belongings get confiscated, sometimes trashed. Tents are leveled and thrown out. Important personal effects and documents can get lost.
Still, Byars said, she hopes she won’t have to move at all.
“I’ve talked to the National Guard, and they told me they’re here to protect the people of D.C.,” Byars said. “That should mean all the people. Right?”
Days after the clearing outside New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, bags, tents and people were already back along the sidewalk. The same cycle had set back in: They came for the day center, then, when it closed, many bedded down nearby.
Kingery has been sleeping on the same street corner, just feet away from where he once lived in McPherson Square’s sprawling homeless encampment, for more than a year.
Byars, who has been removed from every major homeless encampment in the District over the past three years, has decided to try her luck on the same block. It’s familiar territory: She also used to live in the park across the street.
When asked where she might go next, if the federal government’s crackdown forces her to pack up again, Byars shrugged.
That’s a problem for another time.
Baucom and her son spent two nights in a motel. The next night, she felt pain in her shoulders, and the pair landed in the emergency room. She got some sleep there.
By the next evening, Baucom was again sitting on the steps outside the church, waiting for nightfall.
Suffice it to say that nobody in Trump’s freshly gilded White House Royal Palace gives a rat’s ass about D.C.’s homeless people.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/29/trump-dc-homeless-encampments-cleared
No paywall:
CBS News: Anger over Trump administration’s latest firings
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/anger-over-trump-administration-s-latest-firings/vi-AA1Lum22
Independent: Kilmar Abrego Garcia seeks gag order against Trump administration, singles out Noem and Bondi’s ‘inflammatory’ attacks
Barrage of public attacks could taint jury pools with ‘irrelevant, prejudicial, and false claims,’ according to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is asking a federal judge for a gag order to stop Trump administration officials from publicly attacking him with “inflammatory” statements that attorneys say are threatening his right to a fair trial on criminal smuggling charges.
Lawyers for the wrongly deported Salvadoran immigrant say Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi, among others, have spent months publicly disparaging his “character and reputation” by smearing him as a wife beater, pedophile, gang member and terrorist.
“The government’s ongoing barrage of prejudicial statements severely threaten — and perhaps have already irrevocably impaired — the ability to try this case at all — in any venue,” lawyers wrote Thursday night.
The Trump administration has “distorted the events and evidence underpinning his case to the public; misrepresented his criminal record; disseminated false, irrelevant, and inflammatory claims; and expressed the opinion that he is guilty of the crimes charged,” lawyers wrote.
Last month, the federal judge overseeing the criminal case ordered his release from jail before trial, finding that prosecutors failed to show “any evidence” that his history or the arguments against him warrant his ongoing detention. Judges have found the allegations “fanciful” and formally ruled that he does not pose a danger to the public.
Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported to a brutal prison in his home country, igniting a high-profile legal battle for his return at the center of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.
Government lawyers admitted he was removed from the United States due to a procedural error, and several federal judges and a unanimous Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return after his “illegal” arrest.
But the government spent weeks battling court orders for his return while officials launched a barrage of public attacks, declaring that he would never again step foot in the country.
He was then abruptly returned in June to face allegations that he illegally moved other immigrants across the country. He has pleaded not guilty.
In their request to keep him in jail before trial, federal prosecutors claimed he is a member of the transnational gang MS-13 and “personally participated in violent crime, including murder.”
Prosecutors also claimed he “abused” women and trafficked children, firearms and narcotics, and there is also an ongoing investigation into “solicitation of child pornography.”
Abrego Garcia is not facing any charges on any of those allegations, nor has he been convicted of anything. A federal judge determined that the government failed to link those allegations to evidence that implicates him.
Abrego Garcia’s wife had previously sought a protective order against him several years ago, though she never pressed charges and said the couple has since resolved their disputes. She has played a prominent public role defending him.
Last week, a federal judge granted his release from pretrial detention. Immigration authorities arrested him days later and threatened to deport him to Uganda.
A separate judge has blocked the government from deporting him while he challenges his latest arrest. A decision is expected after October 6.
His attorneys have argued that the indictment is aimed at punishing Abrego Garcia for his ongoing legal battle with the Trump administration, which has “vilified” him from the moment the case made headlines that caused massive political headaches for the White House.
After he was released from jail this month, Noem labeled him a “MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser and child predator.”
That same day, the White House called him “a criminal illegal alien, wife-beater and an MS13 gang member facing serious charges of human smuggling.”
This week, the president called him an “animal” who had “beat the hell out of his wife.”
But the “pièce de résistance,” according to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, was a cartoon posted by the White House’s official X account depicting him with “MS-13” written beneath it.
“If the government is allowed to continue in this way, it will taint any conceivable jury pool by exposing the entire country to irrelevant, prejudicial, and false claims about Mr. Abrego,” lawyers wrote.
A DHS official told The Independent that if Abrego Garcia does “not want to be mentioned” by administration officials, “then he should have not entered our country illegally and committed heinous crimes.”
“Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend this criminal illegal MS-13 gang member who is an alleged human trafficker, domestic abuser, and child predator,” the official added.
“The media’s sympathetic narrative about this criminal illegal alien has completely fallen apart, yet they continue to peddle his sob story,” the official said. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
The Justice Department declined to comment to The Independent.
I can’t recall ever seeing the gov’t so obsessed with demonizing someone as Kilmar Garcia.
Raw Story: Governor warns Trump allies: justice will catch up to those aiding his crimes
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker delivered a pointed warning Sunday to Republicans aiding Donald Trump’s efforts to weaponize the federal government against political enemies, vowing they will be held accountable once power shifts. Citing Trump’s threats to send troops into Chicago, Pritzker said history shows justice can be delayed but not denied, and reminded allies that Trump has little loyalty to those who break the law for him. Quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Pritzker declared that the arc of justice “doesn’t bend on its own” — and promised to help force it there if necessary.
Read the full story here.
Independent: Joe Rogan finally realizes Trump doesn’t have evidence of his biggest complaint
The podcaster gave Trump a huge platform when he was a guest on the show in the final week of the 2024 presidential campaign
It has finally dawned on Joe Rogan that President Donald Trump doesn’t appear to have any evidence to back up the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
The podcaster gave Trump a huge platform when he was a guest on the show in the final week of the 2024 presidential election campaign, where he reeled off his widely-debunked grievance that the 2020 election was “fraudulent.”
Now, Rogan has shared his skepticism.
“I don’t think they have any evidence,” Rogan told his guest comedian Dave Smith on Tuesday’s episode ofthe Joe Rogan Experience, referring to Trump’s 2020 claims.
“I think there’s a lot of speculation and there’s a lot of consideration about mail-in ballots. There’s a lot of shenanigans,” Rogan added. “There’s a good record of shenanigans and there’s the reality of any kind of electronics can be hacked.”
“It was one of the most interesting parts of your podcast with him was when you asked him about that, it was like he really didn’t have anything to back it up,” Smith interjected.
Rogan then criticized Trump for not having a “tight 10 minutes” prepared to present his evidence and argument.
“If that was you or if that was me, I mean, there was some reason why I knew that they did something and I could give you all the facts, I would have that ready for anybody,” Rogan said. “Because…you’re, for four f***ing years they’ve been telling him he’s crazy for questioning the election. So after four years I’d have a f***ing tight 10 minutes on the election where I could just rattle off at you and rock your world with it.”
Rogan’s interview, which pulled in 38 million viewers within three days of airing, and other podcast appearances within the so-called “Manosphere” have been credited with helping Trump clinch the presidency.
Rogan, who endorsed Trump after the episode aired, gave him the opportunity to explain his evidence for claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“I want to talk about 2020 because you said over and over again that you were robbed in 2020,” Rogan said. “How do you think you were robbed?”
Trump then launched into a familiar tirade about judges not having “what it took to turn over an election,” mail-in ballots being insecure, and Democrats using “Covid to cheat.”
Rogan appeared to sympathize with Trump. “You get labeled an election denier,” he said, drawing similarities with being labeled an “anti-vaxxer if you question some of the health consequences that people have from the Covid-19 shots.”
More recently, Rogan has been calling out the man he endorsed for president. In July, the podcaster ripped into the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files.
“They’ve got videotape and all a sudden they don’t,” Rogan said. “You had the director of the FBI on this show saying, ‘If there was [a videotape], nothing you’re looking for is on those tapes,’” referring to FBI Director Kash Patel’s interview with Rogan in June.
He also criticized the Trump administration’s aggressive ICE raids on his show, appearing to suggest that they had taken things too far.
“The targeting of migrant workers — not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers. Just construction workers. Showing up in construction sites, raiding them. Gardeners. Like, really?” Rogan said. “I don’t think anybody would have signed up for that.”
Raw Story: Trump’s bizarre Cabinet meeting revealed something ‘a little scary’: ex-White House aide
A former White House national security advisor was taken aback by the Trump administration’s most recent cabinet meeting.
Jake Sullivan, who served as former President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, discussed the meeting on a recent episode of The Bulwark’s podcast on YouTube. He described the meeting as one taken from a “Kim Jong-Un documentary,” referring to the dictatorial leader of North Korea.
“Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Sullivan said. “And there is a kind of ludicrous, humorous quality to it, but it’s also a little bit scary because it reflects something deeper and dangerous about the president’s autocratic tendencies and the fact that these people around him are just so slavish that I don’t think they would stand up to him on anything at any point.”
“And without those kinds of guard rails, I think it’s uh it’s bleak what we may be facing here in the coming days and months,” he added.
Sullivan said the tactics Trump is using to fulfill his autocratic tendencies reminded him of other strongman leaders across the globe.
“This looks a lot like Erdogan in Turkey. It looks a lot like Orban in Hungary,” Sullivan said. “But with one big twist, which is in both of those cases, it took a long time for them to play out their strategy. We’ve been at this now for seven months. And you just look at the breakneck speed with which Trump is moving to try to break down the various guardrails of our democracy.”
“It’s extremely concerning,” he added.
Slingshot News: ‘The Windmills Are Killing This Country’: Trump Goes On Outlandish Tirade About Windmills During Bill Signing Event At The White House
Slingshot News: ‘Unlike Biden, I Stay Awake’: Trump Takes The Low Road, Hurls Insults At Biden During Angry Tirade At Bill Signing Event At The White House
Awake, perhaps, but not with a full deck!
Washington Post: D.C. judges and grand jurors push back on Trump policing surge
A federal grand jury refused to indict a man who threw a sandwich at a federal officer, and grand jurors refused three times to indict a woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent.
President Donald Trump’s surge of federal law enforcement on the streets of D.C. is meeting resistance in the city’s federal courthouse, where magistrate judges have admonished prosecutors for violating defendants’ rights and court rules, and grand jurors have repeatedly refused to issue indictments.
On Tuesday, a federal grand jury refused to indict a former Justice Department employee who threw a sandwich at a federal law enforcement agent in an incident this month that went viral on social media, according to two people with knowledge of the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly. Prosecutors had sought to charge Sean Charles Dunn with a felony count of assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer.
Trump declared a crime emergency this month, giving federal law enforcement agencies and National Guard members unprecedented authority to patrol the nation’s capital, while also enlisting the District’s 3,100-member police force to assist with immigration enforcement. More than 1,000 arrests have followed, according to the White House. Meanwhile, D.C.’s top prosecutor, Jeanine Pirro, ordered her staff to file the stiffest possible charges in every case.
But there are emerging signs that not all of the arrests will stand up to scrutiny in court.
Before prosecutors failed to indict Dunn, a grand jury on three separate occasions this month refused to indict a D.C. woman who was accused of assaulting an FBI agent, another extraordinary rejection of the prosecution’s case. Days later, a federal magistrate judge said an arrest in Northeast Washington was preceded by the “most illegal search I’ve seen in my life” and described another arrest as lacking “basic human dignity.”
While judges are known to criticize prosecutors from time to time, grand jurors only in rare cases refuse to issue an indictment, which requires them to find only probable cause that a crime was committed, the lowest evidentiary bar in criminal cases. Instances of failed indictments have begun to crop up more since Trump took office this year. Grand jurors in Los Angeles have rejected indictments of people who were arrested for protesting the administration’s immigration enforcement actions, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The July 22 scuffle at issue in D.C. federal court occurred weeks before Trump’s law enforcement order, but the grand jurors were presented with the case this month just as federal agents were descending on Washington.
Prosecutors alleged that Sydney Reid was obstructing and recording agents from the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as they attempted to arrest a gang member being released from the D.C. jail who was slated for deportation. An FBI agent scraped her hand against a wall amid the fracas, and prosecutors planned to charge Reid with assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer, a felony offense punishable by up to eight years in prison.
Under the Fifth Amendment, however, charges that carry potential penalties of more than a year in prison must be approved by a grand jury. At least 12 members must vote to authorize an indictment. After striking out with the D.C. grand jury, prosecutors dropped the effort to charge Reid with a felony and instead filed a misdemeanor charge that does not require grand jury approval. The maximum penalty for the misdemeanor is one year in jail.
“After Ms. Reid was wrongfully arrested, the ICE agent told her, ‘You should have just stayed home and minded your business,’” Reid’s public defenders, Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm, said in a statement. “As a United States citizen and a compassionate person, caring about fellow D.C. residents getting snatched off the streets by ICE agents is her business and should be of concern to all human beings.”
They added: “The U.S. attorney can try to concoct crimes to quiet the people but in our criminal justice system, the citizens have the last word. We are anxious to present the misdemeanor case to a jury and to quickly clear Ms. Reid’s name.”
Several recent cases, including Dunn’s, have involved the same felony statute that prosecutors tried to apply to Reid’s case.
Pirro declined to speculate about how juries in D.C., where 90 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump’s opponent in the 2024 presidential race, might respond to criminal cases as the federal crackdown continues.
“The only thing that I can say is we are prosecutors. We are the tip of the spear. We are the ones who take these cases into court, and the burden is on us to prove these cases, and we welcome that burden — beyond a reasonable doubt,” Pirro said at a news conference Tuesday. “Sometimes a jury will buy it and sometimes they won’t. So be it. That’s the way the process works.”
A spokesman for Pirro did not say whether federal prosecutors would try to present the Dunn case to a grand jury a second time. The spokesman, Timothy Lauer, alleged that a government lawyer had violated a court rule requiring confidentiality in grand jury proceedings by disclosing the decision not to indict Dunn. The grand jury’s move in that case was first reported by the New York Times. Dunn’s attorney, Sabrina Shroff, declined to comment.
U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey said at a hearing this month that prosecutors should have promptly notified the court about the grand jury’s decision not to indict Reid but that they held off for days, violating a court rule. “I’ve taken up that issue with the U.S. attorney’s office,” Harvey said last week.
But the most pointed criticisms of Trump’s law enforcement surge have come from Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui, who has castigated law enforcement officials for wearing masks while tackling and arresting a Venezuelan national who worked as a food-delivery driver, for disobeying an order the judge issued this week to release a woman from the D.C. jail, and for arresting and jailing a 37-year-old because “he was a Black man going into Trader Joe’s.”
“I’d say we live in a surreal world right now,” Faruqui said at a court hearing for Christian Enrique Carías Torres, who was taken down by masked federal agents as he exited a Bluestone Lane coffee shop with a delivery order, an arrest that was captured on video by a Washington Post reporter.
“This is not consistent with what I understand the United States of America to be,” the judge told Carías Torres. “You should be treated with basic human dignity. We don’t have a secret police.”
Pirro’s office said in a court filing that Carías Torres ran after officers approached him, struggled as he was being taken down and tried to flee from a police vehicle after being handcuffed, adding that he had missed his immigration court hearings since entering the country in 2023.
Violent crime is down 27 percent so far this year compared with the same period in 2024, according to D.C. police data, and has declined 51 percent when measuring the year-over-year period since Trump issued his order Aug. 11.
The president has painted a portrait of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” in the District, blaming years of passive policing by local authorities and lenient criminal justice policies from Democratic officials.
“But now they are allowed to do whatever the hell they want,” Trump said of D.C. police as he announced his moves. He said criminals in the city are rough and tough, “but we’re rougher and tougher.”
Carías Torres was charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers, just as Dunn and Reid had been, after an officer injured his head while helping take him to the ground. Faruqui ordered that Carías Torres be released pending trial, acknowledging that ICE would have an opportunity to take him into custody to enforce a removal order issued by an immigration court last year.
In another case, federal prosecutors charged Kristal Rios Esquivel with a felony violation of the same statute, which makes it illegal to assault federal officers. Her alleged offense started when she walked through a door that was marked “staff only” at the National Zoo’s bird house, tripping an alarm. As National Zoo Park Police officers arrested her for unlawful entry, Rios Esquivel spat on two of them and kicked one, prosecutors alleged. Her attorney has criticized the arrest as an instance of overpolicing.
Rios Esquivel was held for five days in the D.C. jail before making her initial appearance Monday in Faruqui’s courtroom, which Faruqui said was bad enough. The judge ordered Rios Esquivel released pending trial, but the D.C. Department of Corrections did not free her the same day. Faruqui threatened to impose sanctions in a scathing order issued Tuesday that said officials had subjected Rios Esquivel to illegal detention, and she was released.
“What is especially troubling is that this is not even the first time in the past four months that the Court has encountered this same problem of false imprisonment,” Faruqui wrote, citing another case from April.
At yet another court hearing scrutinizing police tactics in D.C., Faruqui reprimanded federal prosecutors this week for charging Torez Riley with illegally possessing firearms. The judge found that D.C. police officers, who were on patrol with federal agents, violated Riley’s privacy rights by searching his bag, where they found two guns. Riley had previously been convicted of weapons offenses, prosecutors said.
Police said in court documents that Riley’s bag had been searched in part because it appeared to contain something heavy. But that observation was not enough to show probable cause that Riley had committed a crime, the court found.
It was “without a doubt, the most illegal search I’ve seen in my life,” said Faruqui, a former D.C. federal prosecutor, adding that Riley had been jailed and kept away from his three children and pregnant wife for a week because “he was a Black man going into Trader Joe’s.”
Pirro’s office then filed court papers to dismiss the case, and the judge ordered Riley released from a D.C. jail facility.
A spokesman for Pirro said that as soon as she “was shown the body-worn camera footage on Friday, she ordered the dismissal of the charges.” The motion to dismiss was filed Monday.
In response to Faruqui’s criticisms, Pirro said in a statement: “This judge has a long history of bending over backwards to release dangerous felons in possession of firearms and on frequent occasions he has downplayed the seriousness of felons who possess illegal firearms and the danger they pose to our community.”
But Faruqui also admonished Riley over his firearm possession. “You will die, you will kill somebody, or you will end up in jail,” the judge said.
Riley is set to face consequences in Maryland, where Faruqui said authorities would use what they learned in the “blatantly illegal” D.C. search to show he violated his probation in an earlier gun possession case. A bench warrant was issued Monday over the probation violation, according to records from Prince George’s County Circuit Court.
Riley’s wife, Crashawna Williams, said she took a week off from the beauty classes she’s enrolled in to deal with her husband’s case while taking care of their boys, ages 3, 8 and 12.
“I feel like he shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place,” Williams said. But, she added, what could they do?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/27/trump-crime-surge-court-cases