US President Donald Trump has attempted to portray his deployment of National Guard troops and other federal agents in Washington, DC as a boon for public safety.
Inside DC courtrooms, however, judges and defense attorneys have expressed alarm at the tactics being used by law enforcement officers to unfairly charge local residents with serious crimes that carry lengthy prison sentences.
NPR reports that US Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui expressed incredulity on Monday while dismissing weapons charges against a Maryland resident named Torez Riley, who was subjected to what the judge described as "without a doubt the most illegal search I've ever seen in my life."
While reviewing the case, the judge said that law enforcement officials seem to have targeted Riley for a search simply because he was a Black man carrying what appeared to be a heavy backpack.
"I'm absolutely flabbergasted at what has happened," Faruqui said. "A high school student would know this was an illegal search."
The Department of Justice had agreed to drop the charges after body camera footage of Riley's arrest showed officers searching him without probable cause, but Faruqui said that was cold comfort for a defendant who had already spent the last week behind bars.
"We don't just charge people criminally and then say, 'Oops, my bad,'" the judge said. "I'm at a loss how the US Attorney's office thought this was an appropriate charge in any court, let alone the federal court."
Faruqui also noted that judges in his court "on multiple occasions" in recent weeks had taken the highly unusual step of moving to suppress search warrants used against suspects, which makes them inadmissible to use in court.
NPR's report echoes an article in The New York Times earlier this week that detailed some of the difficulties the government is having in making some of its charges stick in the wake of Trump's DC crackdown.
In its report, the Times focused the arrest of 28-year-old Amazon delivery driver named Mark Bigelow, who was hit with federal felony charges for allegedly assaulting law enforcement officials who were attempting to detain him over a misdemeanor offense of possessing an open container of alcohol.
"As he was placed in a vehicle, the handcuffed Mr. Bigelow became belligerent, twisting his body and yelling, 'Get off me! Y'all too little, bro!' at an ICE agent, according to a court filing, which described how Mr. Bigelow made 'physical contact' by kicking an agent in the hand and another in the leg," reported the Times. "As a result, Mr. Bigelow was charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal officer, an offense that carries a maximum sentence of eight years in prison."
Federal public defender Elizabeth Mullin said in court last week that Bigelow would never have been charged with a federal felony were it not for the president's decision to send federal agents swarming the streets of the nation's capital.
"He was caught up in this federal occupation of DC," she said. "This was a case created by federal law enforcement."
The Times also reported on Monday that federal prosecutors had reduced charges against a woman named Sidney Lori Reid, who was accused of assaulting an FBI agent during a protest against Trump's immigration policies last month. The decision to refile Reid's case as a misdemeanor came after prosecutors failed on three separate occasions to convince a grand jury to charge her with felony offenses.
Attorneys Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm, who have been representing Reid, said that the grand juries' refusal to indict their client on three separate occasions indicated fatal weaknesses in the government's case.
"The US attorney can try to concoct crimes to quiet the people, but in our criminal justice system, the citizens have the last word," they said. "We are anxious to present the misdemeanor case to a jury and to quickly clear Ms. Reid's name."
