Members of the National Guard walk past the USDepartment of Labor, in Washington, D.C. January 8, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
For today's recommended read, Reuters reviewed every publicly available charging document filed in Superior Court and interviewed lawyers, residents and service members to gauge the impact of the roughly 4,500 soldiers currently deployed to the nation's capital.
This after President Donald Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., last summer in an effort to combat crime.
Every day, small clots of soldiers in camouflage and body armor patrol tourist-heavy areas of the US capital. But since their arrival last August, the National Guard soldiers Trump ordered to Washington have been mentioned in only a tiny fraction — about 1.3% — of the criminal cases filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. In dozens of cases, the soldiers appear not as people making the arrests but as victims of crime.
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