Thousands of National Guard troops deployed by Donald Trump are still patrolling Washington every day, but court records show they have been tied to only a small slice of the city’s criminal cases. Since they arrived last August, the soldiers have appeared in about 1.3% of cases filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
The scale of the deployment is easy to miss until the numbers are lined up. About 4,500 soldiers are now in Washington, outnumbering the city’s 3,200 police officers, and the administration told Congress last year the operation was costing about $1.65 million a day. This summer, officials doubled the number of troops and said they plan to keep sending soldiers until the end of Trump’s presidency in 2029, at a projected cost of $1.4 billion.
The soldiers are not spread evenly across the city. They patrol in small groups through tourist-heavy areas, including national monuments, subway stations and the area around Washington’s professional baseball park. reviewed every publicly available charging document filed in Superior Court to gauge the impact of the deployment, and found the troops mostly turned up in minor incidents in neighborhoods that are wealthier, whiter and less dangerous than other parts of the capital.
That pattern leaves a hard question hanging over the White House’s claim that the deployment has driven down crime. In one case this spring, three police officers responded to a nightclub where a man was stomping on a young woman lying on the sidewalk. Xavier Jimenez wrote in the police report that there were approximately 15 National Guard members nearby on routine patrol who did not take any action. In other cases, the soldiers have sometimes broken up fights or assaults, but they have also shown up as victims of crime rather than as the people making arrests.
There is another gap in the record. found no reference in court files to soldiers doing any law enforcement in the neighborhoods where about 82% of the city’s 859 murders over the past five years occurred. Instead, the deployment has largely stayed where visitors and federal landmarks are already watched closely, not where the city’s deadliest violence has been concentrated. Lauren Bis, the White House spokeswoman, said Trump’s efforts in the city have “driven down crime, beautified the city, and improved quality of life for countless individuals,” while Mayor Muriel Bowser has called the deployment problematic.
The result is a force that is large, expensive and highly visible, but still difficult to measure by the standard that matters most: what it actually stopped. The administration has committed to keeping the troops in Washington through 2029, yet the court records reviewed so far show the deployment has been used far more as a show of presence than as an instrument of law enforcement.
