Thousands of National Guard members have been deployed in Washington, D.C. by Donald Trump, but they appear to be stopping little crime, according to a report. The deployment was billed as an effort to tackle ‘out of control’ crime in the city, but just 1.3 per cent of the criminal cases filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia mention the National Guard’s soldiers.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the troop rollout had already cost $223 million by the end of 2025. An analysis of every available charging document filed at the court by Reuters found that the National Guard’s soldiers, who have been deputized as U.S. Marshals, responded mostly to whiter and wealthier neighborhoods in the city.
Rev. Norman Nixon, the pastor at the Union Temple Baptist Church, alleged that the soldiers ‘harass people a lot more than they are actually doing police work.’ The outlet also found no references to soldiers conducting law enforcement in areas where around 82 percent of the city’s 859 murders occurred over the past five years.
Only 217 criminal cases in Washington D.C mentioned the National Guard. In 62 of those cases, soldiers had stopped people suspected of committing crime single-handedly - often for cases involving minor crimes, such as shoplifting. A spokesperson for the White House claimed that Trump had ‘driven down crime, beautified the city and improved quality of life for countless individuals’ when asked about the soldiers’ work.
The deployment of the National Guard was announced by Trump after declaring a ‘public safety emergency’ in August 2025. However, prior to the National Guard’s deployment in Washington, D.C., the murder rate in the city had actually fallen from 274 in 2023 to 187 in 2024, according to the Metropolitan Police Department. That number fell again to 127 in 2025.
Maintaining the National Guard’s deployment in Washington, D.C. will cost an additional $1.4 billion through to the end of Trump’s term, according to information provided to Congress and reviewed by The Washington Post.
