WASHINGTON: District of Columbia officials and the US Justice Department negotiated a deal under the urging of a federal judge on Friday that scales back President Donald Trump’s attempted takeover of the capital city’s police force.

Under the accord presented by the two sides to US District Judge Ana Reyes, Trump administration lawyers conceded that DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s appointed police chief, Pamela Smith, would remain in command of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department.

The precise role of Drug Enforcement Administration head Terry Cole, who had been named by US Attorney General Pam Bondi as the city’s “emergency police commissioner” under Trump’s takeover bid, was still to be hashed out in negotiations.

The two sides opened talks on Friday afternoon at Reyes’ insistence during a hearing before the judge on a lawsuit brought by the city challenging Trump’s unprecedented move to assume full control of city law enforcement, invoking an emergency clause of the district’s 50-year-old-plus home rule charter.

The lawsuit sought a federal court ruling to block the takeover as illegal, according to DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb. During oral arguments on Friday, Reyes expressed scepticism that the Trump administration has legal authority to run the city’s police force or that Cole can effectively take charge of the department as its chief.

“I still do not understand on what basis the president, through the attorney general, through Mr Cole, can say: ‘You, police department, can’t do anything unless I say you can,’” Reyes told a Justice Department lawyer. Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement

before the hearing: “The Trump administration has the lawful authority to assert control over the DC police, which is necessary due to the emergency that has arisen in our nation’s capital as a result of failed leadership.”

Trump said on Monday he was deploying hundreds of National Guard troops to Washington and temporarily taking over the city’s police department to curb what he has depicted as a crime emergency in the US capital. Statistics show that violent crime shot up in 2023 but has been rapidly declining since.Federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the DEA, have deployed agents to patrol the streets and carry out arrests. On Thursday, US Attorney General Pam Bondi issued an order transferring control of the police department from the city to the DEA’s Cole.

Trump, who has suggested he could take similar actions in other Democratic-controlled cities, has sought to expand the presidency in his second term, inserting himself into the affairs of major banks, law firms and elite universities.

Friday’s lawsuit, which names Trump, Bondi, Cole, and others as defendants, intensified a growing battle over the city between Bondi and Bowser, who have emerged as the public faces of the power struggle.

Bondi’s order had stipulated that the city must receive approval from Cole before it can issue any directives to the roughly 3,500-member police force. It also sought to rescind several of the police department’s prior directives, including one that addressed its level of involvement with federal immigration enforcement.

Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2025