On a humid Friday night in Washington, DC, Juan Carlos Dela Torre was doing something unremarkable: standing on a sidewalk, smoking a joint. Within minutes, he was in handcuffs. Federal officers confiscated the marijuana, searched him, said they found a small amount of MDMA, and sent him to jail.“I’ve never seen this much police presence in my whole life,” Dela Torre, a 37-year-old massage therapist who has lived in the city since 1994 was quoted as saying by NYT. “You guys are worried about some guy smoking a joint on the corner on a Friday night?”Trump’s ‘rescue mission’The arrest is one of nearly 1,000 made since President Donald Trump declared Washington “out of control” and vowed to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor.” Elite federal agencies, from the FBI to the Secret Service, were deployed in mid-August, flooding the city with checkpoints, foot patrols, and undercover stings, NYT reported.Officials tout the results: violent crime down 45%, property crime down 12% in just two weeks, NYT reported. “We already had good momentum coming into the federal surge, and it made it better,” said city administrator Kevin Donahue.But arrest records reviewed by The New York Times tell a more complicated story: many of the detentions have little to do with violent crime. Instead, federal officers are stopping cars for tinted windows, citing people for open containers, and running low-dollar drug stings.Small offenses, big consequencesMore than half of the charges involve drugs or guns, some against people licensed to carry firearms elsewhere but not in D.C. Another 18% are for traffic and minor violations, like drinking in public. Only 9% of arrests tied to federal agents directly involved violent or property crimes.One case involved a $20 cocaine buy-and-bust. Another, an arrest over an open tequila bottle in a car, escalated into a felony gun charge when police spotted a Glock with an extended magazine.The strategy resembles the “broken windows” policing of the 1990s, where tackling small infractions was seen as a path to bigger busts. But for residents, the effect is unsettling. “It is bringing a sense of fear in the community,” said Jawana Hardy, 35, after watching a platoon of officers march into a neighborhood cookout.‘Optics’ vs safetyCritics argue the crackdown is less about fighting crime than creating a show of force. “People who are not the problem are being locked up to create optics,” said Ron Moten, a longtime anti-violence activist. “It’s making good everyday working people afraid to walk in the District of Columbia.”The majority of those arrested are Black, a disproportionate share in a city where Black residents make up just over 40% of the population. Arrests cluster heavily in Ward 8, which has some of DC’s highest violent crime rates.And while federal officials are unfazed by the city’s overcrowded jail, residents like Kimberly Mitchell are left recalibrating daily life. She recently paid $175 for tinted windows on her car. “Now I want to get it taken off,” she said.For Dela Torre, the massage therapist caught smoking a joint, the surge is personal. What was once a familiar city sidewalk now feels like a stage for a federal dragnet.
