President Donald Trump’s order this week to deploy federal troops to Washington, D.C. in an effort to stamp out crime had produced a little over 100 arrests as of Thursday — a figure that Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker torched as severely underwhelming.
“It took a military occupation to pull this off?” Parker wrote in an op-ed published Friday in The Washington Post.
According to Time magazine, 1,450 federal officers were deployed to the nation’s Capitol, increasing to more than 1,650 as of Wednesday. Around 30 National Guard troops are also present, with the Trump administration having said 800 more could be deployed if needed.
Between the first two nights of the federal takeover, 66 arrests were made, with another 45 being made Wednesday — numbers that Parker argued paled in comparison to the potential millions of dollars the deployment will cost taxpayers.
“In fact, 1,450 officers participated in Tuesday night’s operation to arrest 43 people; this comes to 34 officers per alleged offender,” Parker wrote.
“On Wednesday night, 1,650 officers participated, which breaks down to about 37 officers per alleged criminal. And on Thursday, 20 officers arrested a plainly overwrought man who allegedly threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent at 14th and U streets NW. Your tax dollars at work.”
Arrests were made for charges of assault, drug possession, and carrying concealed weapons, along with one charge of assaulting a federal officer, the aforementioned incident that was captured on film as a resident threw a Subway sandwich at an officer before attempting to flee.
The federal takeover has also seen federal officers arrest suspected undocumented immigrants, with 29 of those arrested Wednesday being suspected of residing in the country illegally.
Trump’s D.C. takeover was met with fierce protests, including more than 100 residents demonstrating near a newly established vehicle checkpoint. Parker encouraged such dissent to continue, and warned that “complacency (was) not a proper reaction to what is happening to D.C. right now.”
“Regardless of whether National Guard troops carry weapons, their presence is a warning that the city is under Trump’s control,” she wrote.