A year in, thousands of armed troops have quietly become a fixture of D.C. life

The Washington Monument is seen in the distance as members of the National Guard stand atop the steps at the Lincoln Memorial at sunrise on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on July 23, 2026. Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

On a recent sunny day at a neighborhood park in Washington, D.C., dozens of people stretched out on blankets, laughing and picnicking with friends. Dogs happily rolled in the grass. A young dad played catch with a kid. And a line of four National Guard members in full uniform, each armed with a handgun, walked single file through the scene.

The troops paused at a corner and formed a circle facing outward, each looking in a different direction. They stood like that for a minute or two, surveyed the assembled crowd, and then continued on.

Thousands of National Guard members have been patrolling the streets of Washington D.C. for a year now, in an anti-crime deployment that was quietly extended until Inauguration Day of 2029 .

Armed and uniformed troops have become a ubiquitous — and controversial — part of the city scenery, appearing on busy streets, in farmer's markets, metro stations and around the national monuments. And while activists have hung signs throughout the city urging "National Guard Go Home" and "Troops Out," life in D.C. has largely settled to coexist around their presence.

It is both the longest and the largest of such deployments under this administration, which has repeatedly used the military domestically in unprecedented ways. All of those deployments have been challenged in court — but it's a pattern that constitutional experts and former military officials have been ringing the alarm bells about for more than a year.

Trump first deployed the National Guard to D.C. in August of 2025 — something the president can do because of the unique status of the city — after declaring a "crime emergency" and launching the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force , despite violent crime being at a 30-year low . While homicides are down this year, violent crime is actually up compared to 2025, according to data from the city .

"I worry about these troops standing on street corners fading into the background, and people starting to accept this as just a fact of life," says Joseph Nunn, counsel at the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security program. "Armed military personnel standing on the street corners in an American city should never be normal."