Bondi names Cole as D.C. ‘emergency police commissioner’
WASHINGTON – Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday night rescinded Washington, D.C., policies that restrict local police from aiding in immigration enforcement as she moved to tighten the Trump administration’s grip over law enforcement in the nation’s capital.
The two-page order from Bondi also declared that Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who had already been overseeing the federal takeover of the city’s police department, was now the “emergency police commissioner,” with “all the powers and duties” invested in the city’s police chief, Pamela A. Smith.
The police department, including Smith, must now receive approval from Cole before issuing any directives, the attorney general declared.
The new directive, which seems intended to turn Washington from a sanctuary city into one that aggressively pursues immigrants living in the country illegally, was the most overt imposition yet by the Justice Department on the city’s police since the federal takeover. It could prove to be a new flash point in the relationship between the city’s Democratic leadership and the Republican administration.
A spokesperson for Mayor Muriel Bowser did not immediately comment, but Bowser had said she was “very concerned” about a milder immigration directive the police chief had issued Thursday morning.
The earlier directive loosened restrictions on whether local police officers working with the new federal agents swarming the city could talk about the immigration status of people they stopped. But that order also reiterated long-standing city policy preventing police from pursuing immigration cases.
Bondi’s directive goes further, declaring invalid city regulations dating to 2023 and 2024 that prohibit local police officers from arresting people solely for being immigrants lacking permanent legal status, and banning most kinds of cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
While Bowser has criticized President Donald Trump’s decision Monday to declare a crime emergency in the nation’s capital and flood the city with hundreds of National Guard troops and additional federal law enforcement agents, the mayor and the police chief have insisted they are cooperating well with the Trump administration and can use the extra help to reduce crime.
The order comes as local police conduct joint patrols with federal agents as part of Trump’s takeover of law enforcement in the nation’s capital.
The president’s border czar said this week that the deployment of federal law enforcement across Washington would effectively negate local laws that limit cooperation with deportation efforts.
“D.C. under federal control is not going to be a sanctuary city,” the official, Tom Homan, said on Fox News on Wednesday.
“We’re working with the police hand in hand: When we encounter a criminal illegal alien, they’ll be turned over to ICE, and that’s the way it should be,” he added, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Kash Patel, the FBI director, said on social media Thursday that federal law enforcement agencies had made 45 arrests during their stepped-up overnight patrols in the city. Of those, 29 were “immigration-related,” he said.
The FBI declined to comment when asked to clarify the status of the 29 people, and what “immigration-related” arrests entailed. Washington’s local police, the Metropolitan Police Department, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Under Washington’s sanctuary city law, known as the Sanctuary Values Amendment Act of 2020, local police officers have not been permitted to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement authorities by handing over anyone in their custody or by giving them access to detention spaces, except when a federal criminal charge is involved.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.