The National Guard keeps appearing outside D.C. schools, stoking tensions

Twice in the last few weeks, National Guard members have appeared in places where residents did not expect to see them: congregating outside D.C. public schools around student drop-off times.

Jamais Burts-Parker said she encountered troops and FBI agents changing into tactical gear in the immediate vicinity of Bard High School Early College DC on Monday morning. Burts-Parker said she was rattled and left with concerns on whether a serious incident had happened over the weekend that merited a sizable response from federal law enforcement.

"And then we found out, no, it's just a part of this initiative," said Burts-Parker, who is the president of the school's parent-teacher organization. "It's just alarming to drop your kid off, and your kid is seeing armed guards that are trained to be in the military outside of their high school where they're coming to learn."

Guard members and the FBI have remained around the school and the nearby Congress Heights Metro station since then, according to residents and observations by a reporter.

The U.S. Marshals Service, which has spoken for the recently launched initiative, said the agencies are there to deter crime. But the timing of the appearances at the start of the school day has been questioned by community members and educators, who say they're unsettling families while doing little to move the needle on crime.

The scope of the initiative, which has been reported in at least three neighborhoods, is unclear, and the Marshals Service declined to list all of the locations it has visited so far.

Brady McCarron, a Marshals Service spokesperson, said the team of troops and federal agents are serving warrants, checking on registered sex offenders, patrolling areas to deter crime, passing out fliers on wanted suspects and conducting "goodwill gestures," which he described as asking residents "how things are going."

The federal agency says it determines which areas to deploy the task force in by examining crime data, outstanding warrants and the number of registered sex offenders living there.

"When a spike of calls is seen in a certain area of the city, that area will be the one that the team will go to," McCarron said. "The goal is to see the trend of crime in an area and eliminate it as fast as possible."

But Mayor Muriel E. Bowser's office has pushed back, citing community concerns about National Guard troops and federal agents patrolling near D.C.'s schools, recreation centers and voting sites.

"The Bowser Administration has repeatedly requested that the federal taskforce and the National Guard refrain from patrolling near these locations and will continue to do so," said Lindsey Appiah, deputy mayor over public safety, in a statement.

Overall, crime is down 15 percent in the District since Oct. 1, 2025, McCarron said. "But we want it down even more," he said. "We want this operation to be very successful, not just successful."

McCarron said the idea for the visits to D.C. schools was born out of discussions around how to lower crime.

"Since the program has only had a few spots we have focused on over the last two months, we are still calculating to see if it is working," he said.

There have been three studies so far that have attempted to determine whether the National Guard patrols in D.C. have brought down crime rates, though none of them are peer-reviewed. So far, none of the studies found that the patrols have had an effect on violent crime, though one of them found a "real but narrow improvement" in property crime during the first six months -- about a 24 percent reduction that the study suggested could have been achieved in a less expensive manner by adjusting deployments of local police.

The Marshals Service confirmed at least three operations, including Monday's appearance, have taken place as part of this new endeavor emerging from President Donald Trump's D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, which has sought, among other priorities, to ensure increased law enforcement patrols.

The first appearance took place on Aug. 7 and Aug. 8 at Saratoga and Potomac Gardens, McCarron said.

But the operation began to receive media attention around Sept. 17, when large groups of National Guard members and federal agents appeared outside Bruce-Monroe Elementary School in the Park View neighborhood of Northwest Washington as children arrived for the school day.

In interviews with The Washington Post, several parents and nearby residents said they were shocked by the appearance of armed law enforcement.

A Park View father, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of repercussions due to his immigration status, said he observed a U.S. Park Police helicopter flying "really low in very close loops" around the school and the surrounding area. A Park Police spokesperson wrote that its helicopter was operating in the area that day in support of the Marshals Service, but that it was "unrelated to deployments to D.C. area schools."

The father said an FBI agent approached him and offered a flier promoting cash rewards for tips, reading that "law enforcement is seeking information related to criminal activity."

Bridget O'Brien, a Park View resident, said she noticed several groups of National Guard members and federal agents patrolling the neighborhood that morning. She said she approached one group and asked what they were doing there.

"They basically said, 'We were asked to come to this neighborhood to engage and deter crime,' and they asked if I had any requests for them," O'Brien said. "I said I would like them to leave our neighborhood, and they said they understood and they would try to make it the least unpleasant they could."

Several Park View residents said large groups of task force members have continued to patrol the neighborhood since Sept. 17.

"They're trying to remind us that they can have a presence here," said Vincent Cleveland, who said he is one of several residents following task force activity in the neighborhood. "I think it does put people a bit more on guard."

A petition urging the city to do more to oppose the presence of task force members outside of schools garnered more than 300 signatures from parents and residents across the District.

"We know from talking to our children that having patrols of uniformed soldiers with military weapons and armed federal enforcement agents leads many of our kids to be fearful and distracted from learning," the petitioners wrote in a letter to D.C. Council member Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), a copy of which was shared with The Post. "As parents and caregivers, we cannot accept this wasteful and unnecessary use of law enforcement resources that we know is creating more fear for our children and risk of violence in our communities instead of more safety."

In a statement, Pinto said she met with parents from schools across the District "who have seen an alarming increased presence of armed National Guard troops outside their children's schools." She called the development "unacceptable."

"Our kids deserve to go to school in safe, welcoming environments and being exposed to dozens of armed guards as they try to enter their school buildings is not productive, necessary, nor appropriate," wrote Pinto, who added that she is calling on the guard to not congregate near schools and intends to hold a hearing on the topic on Nov. 5.

LaJoy Johnson-Law, the Ward 8 representative for D.C.'s State Board of Education, said residents, youth advocacy organizations and parents have led a counterresponse since Monday at Bard DC to ensure students feel safe arriving to school.

"We want them to know that there's a community behind you and that there is a community that loves you," Johnson-Law said. "And that's what community is."

Michael Scott, the director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing at Arizona State University, said the "fundamental problem" with the Marshal Service's stated mission for the initiatives at schools is that it is doing the work uninvited.

Scott, a former police chief, said that collaborative initiatives among local, state and federal law enforcement can work well, but only when they're mutually agreed upon and primarily at the request of the local agency.

"It's ludicrous to imagine that you can just throw a National Guardsman or a U.S. marshal into that local context and they could instantly, based on their training and body of knowledge, police in the same way that a properly trained local officer could do it," he said.

Scott added that he felt it was unfair to ask federal agents to do that, and counterproductive.

"If they're dealing with local policing in Washington, they're not dealing with international drug dealers, international fugitives, higher-level federal law enforcement," Scott said. "So they're both unnecessary to what they are doing, and they're depleting and distracting their attention from the things we expect them to do."