Every night as dusk settles in Lincoln Park, the sound of spoons and ladles banging metal pots and pans fills the air for five minutes straight, followed by the chant 'We'll be back.' This nightly ritual is known as a cacerolazo, a form of resistance dating back to the 1830s, from France to Latin America. Residents all over Washington DC have been participating in it almost every night for nearly a year, starting when Donald Trump deployed thousands of national guard troops to the city.
Residents Describe 'City Under Siege'
'As long as they're going to be here, I'm going to be here,' said Chris Salm, a resident in the area. 'We need to show some resistance to what's happening to our city.' Their protests are some of the few in a city that has otherwise become uncomfortably accustomed to the troops in their camouflage fatigues and gun holsters patrolling neighborhoods as part of a presidential executive order declaring a crime emergency last August. This week, that order was extended through January 2029, when Trump leaves the White House.
'It's a city under siege,' said Mike Licht, who has been living in his DC neighborhood for 40 years. 'I've seen some changes, but this is the most disturbing one. Armed troops aimlessly walking our streets, they've got nothing to do, they're bored.'
Local Officials Lack Power Over Guard
For months, roughly 2,000-2,500 national guard troops have been patrolling metro stations, parks, city streets, neighborhoods and tourist attractions throughout Washington DC. In July, that number doubled to more than 5,000 troops from more than a dozen states as part of the federal government's 'summer surge' of law enforcement surrounding major events for the nation's 250th birthday celebration. District of Columbia officials are pushing for the troops' withdrawal, but they have limited control because the nation's capital isn't a state and the mayor, Muriel Bowser, doesn't have the authority to call up the DC national guard, only to request them. City officials also don't have any control over the troop deployments from other states.
'The national guard is not contributing to law enforcement,' said the DC council chair, Phil Mendelson. 'The presence of armed soldiers on our streets is unnecessary, hurts potential visitors to the district, creates the wrong impression about safety, and that's not helpful.'
DC councilwoman Janeese Lewis George, the presumptive Democratic nominee for DC's mayor, has pledged to work with the federal government and the Trump administration to improve conditions for DC residents. 'Governors across the country have been bullied, bribed and misled into misusing their national guard for armed patrols of DC neighborhoods that result in harm to the troops themselves and our community in DC,' Lewis George said. 'It's been almost a year, and we must not normalize this.'
Limited Impact on Crime Despite High Cost
While national guard members do not make arrests themselves, Trump administration officials argue that their efforts are helping reduce crime around the city. The US Department of Justice reports that the broader DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force, composed of more than 30 federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has made more than 13,900 arrests, removed more than 1,500 illegal firearms and found 23 missing children since the beginning of the operation last August. The justice department said this taskforce will continue for three more years.
But new analysis from the Niskanen Center, a non-partisan thinktank, shows that the national guard deployment has had very little effect on violent crime in DC, despite the steep price tag of about $1.65m every day for taxpayers nationwide. The report found that the deployment led to a 24% drop in 'opportunistic' property crime within the first six months, but the national guard's presence had no effect on violent crime, which was already declining in recent years. In fact, it was two national guard members who came under fire during an ambush-style shooting last November at a DC Metro station. Spc Sarah Beckstrom was killed in the shooting, and Sgt Andrew Wolfe was seriously injured, according to the US attorney's office for the District of Columbia.
'We Are 10 Months into a Military Occupation'
For members of the Free DC grassroots movement, the summer surge of federal troops is an unwanted escalation. 'There is an occupation of our community,' said Keya Chatterjee, executive director of the collective alliance of DC residents resisting Trump's policies. 'One of the most dangerous things they've done is they've normalized the presence of the military on our streets … Because it's not just immigrants under attack, it's actually everybody that they think they can pick off who they've attacked, whether that's your trans neighbor or whether that's your immigrant neighbor.'
During the height of increased federal immigration enforcement in DC last summer, Chatterjee said Free DC volunteers helped direct traffic away from any national guard checkpoints. The activist organization has also been documenting intense and even violent encounters between national guard troops and residents, posting the videos on social media. 'It is very surreal and isolating, because the rest of the country, the rest of the world, doesn't seem to understand that we are 10 months into a military occupation,' she said.
Native Washingtonian Darius Baxter believes the national guard isn't even patrolling in areas suffering from high crime. 'It's not uncommon to see the national guardsmen congregating around the Safeway, sort of dispersing people for loitering versus seeing them position in and around the public housing community, supporting young people that often find themselves in the line of gunfire, particularly in the warmer months of the year,' said Baxter, chief engagement officer of GoodProjects DC, a non-profit focused on supporting DC youth and their families. He juxtaposes this with his own organization's approach: deploying people to specific wards with violent crime. 'When [staff are] out there, they have a responsibility to be making points of contact with members of the community, to be identifying individuals that have a high propensity to be the victims or the perpetrators of violent crime, and doing what they can to intervene.'
Baxter believes that if federal officials wanted to effectively reduce crime in the city, they would have to address the root causes of it first. 'What we're seeing is the product of a population of young people that were undersocialized, undereducated and underinvested in, and those young people become teenagers, and those teenagers become adults, those adults have kids, and that cycle is just repeated time and time and time again.'
Back in Northeast Washington, right next to a statue of Abraham Lincoln, the orchestra of pots and pans banging together into the summer night continues. Longtime resident Licht said he and his neighbors will keep up their nightly protests until the national guard leaves the city. 'It's five minutes of the first amendment,' he said.
