One Year of Federal Occupation and DC Organizers Say Jeanine Pirro Is Running a Scheme

On a sweltering Monday afternoon in early August, organizers gathered in front of DC Superior Court to mark one year of federalized policing in the District. They did not come to commemorate anything. They came to name what a year of it has cost.

Speakers directed their remarks at Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, describing her as the head of a scheme that keeps the local court lockup list at or above 100 people and the DC Jail population at least 18 percent higher than what was recorded before the federal surge began.

Frankie Seabron, program manager for Harriet's Wildest Dreams, put the volume of it plainly, saying that so many people have been arrested and so many charges pushed to stick that the court has had to expand its operating hours to process them.

Ellen Hornstein of the Lawyers Defending American Democracy also spoke to the lengths the US attorney's office has gone in specific cases.

The rally was organized as part of Black August, a tradition of political education and resistance observed in Black communities across the country. In DC this year that observance had a specific local target: a full year of heightened federal enforcement in a city that does not control its own prosecutor.

The numbers organizers cited are the argument. A lockup list holding at or above 100 and a jail population running 18 percent above baseline are not abstractions. They represent people cycling through a system that expanded its own hours to keep up with the pace of arrests.

DC residents elect a mayor and a council but do not elect the prosecutor who charges them. The US attorney for the District is a presidential appointee. That arrangement makes the District uniquely exposed when federal enforcement priorities shift, because the people most affected have no ballot-box remedy.

Organizers used the anniversary to press that point. A year in, the coalition of groups doing this work in DC is not asking for a study. They are asking for the surge to end.

Federal enforcement patterns established in the District rarely stay in the District. Maryland and Virginia jurisdictions in the metro area watch DC closely, and what becomes normal here shapes what becomes possible next door. The organizers in front of Superior Court understand that. That is why they keep showing up.