The resistance is active in DC—you’re just not looking closely enough

It’s 7 p.m. on Thursday and Elli, a 19-year-old transplant from Chattanooga, Tennessee, just took an Adderall. The DC resident, who goes by they/them pronouns and asked Mother Jones not to publish their last name, needed the boost of energy. They’re drained from spending the last several nights roving the city on foot to surveil the FBI and ICE agents who are—under the orders of President Donald Trump—surveilling the people of DC.

“Wherever there are people watching, law enforcement gets intimidated,” the lanky teenager explained of their efforts as we walked past tactical military vehicles in Navy Yard.

Elli wouldn’t make it back to their apartment until 2 a.m. on Friday, after visiting six DC neighborhoods and uploading 10 social media posts alerting followers to various forms of law enforcement activity. In all, Elli’s iPhone shows they’ve walked upwards of 20,000 steps a day while documenting the federal takeover. 

And Elli was just one of more than a dozen of self-appointed watchdogs I observed participating in what amounted to an after-dark patrol squad on Thursday night. The scene contrasted with what a columnist described as a “weirdly quiet” local response in a Politico piece titled, “Why Washington Residents Aren’t Flooding the Streets to Protest Trump,” published earlier that day.

While it’s accurate to say there hasn’t been anything close to a modern-day March on Washington since Trump brought in the National Guard to address DC’s purported crime problem, the DC locals who are wrestling with the increased presence of law enforcement say that’s for good reason. Megaphones and mass demonstrations are unlikely to mollify the hazards of a heightened police state—and these tactics may even exacerbate what Trump-opposing locals fear most: bigger dispatches of law enforcement, which could target more immigrants and other vulnerable populations.

“Being a middle-aged white man, I can be outside and keep an eye on what’s happening,” says Andrew Hall, a DC resident of 19 years who lingered around the corner of 14th and U St NW around 9:30 p.m., after a concert protesting the National Guard presence ended. “It’s not safe for others to be out in public, or even go to the grocery store right now.”

But what’s clear from merely existing in my city this week is that the “lack of street-level backlash” the Politico columnist lamented isn’t the full picture of DC’s response to the federal agents donning tactical vests near our landmarks. There is plenty of backlash—it’s just a grittier and less organized form of it, carried out by Washingtonians with cellphone cameras and some spare time. The DC resistance isn’t manifesting this week as recognizable members of Congress marching up and down Pennsylvania Avenue with CNN cameras in tow, but as an array of ordinary DC residents documenting what’s happening in their neighborhoods and mobilizing pop-up actions based on the information being shared.

In the densely populated Northwest DC neighborhood of Columbia Heights on Tuesday, for example, locals noticed about a dozen Homeland Security personnel outside a metro station. “ICE go home!” some 150-plus people chanted at the agents, several of whom had their faces covered with masks. The growing crowd and their pinpointed cameras were apparently enough to deter the ICE agents from the area, which has a high population of Black and Hispanic residents. 

In Mount Pleasant, an even smaller display of opposition took place recently when a local woman approached what appeared to be a handful of off-the-clock federal agents sitting outside a restaurant. She repeatedly asked them if they were locals, where they lived, and what agency they worked for while filming them. Declining to answer her questions, the three or four individuals eventually walked to a black Hyundai Sonata with an out-of-state license plate. “Nobody likes you,” she yelled in a video shared by the news outlet Migrant Insider on Thursday. “Get the fuck out of my neighborhood!”

On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller took a field trip to visit the National Guard troops patrolling outside Union Station. While there, the politicians got some Shake Shack—plus a stupendous amount of heckling. The opposition included professional protestors who have shown up daily at the train station since May, as well as many residents who happened to be there for their daily commute. 

In the days since, more and more DC locals have been trying to gather information what to do should they encounter the federal agents, or the politicians who ordered them here. On a Zoom call organized by the DC-statehood group Free DC Friday morning, more than 250 showed up and asked questions about best practices for fighting back. In break-out rooms, attendees discussed walking around their neighborhoods with signs alerting people to the presence of ICE, as well as joining ward-based Signal chats to organize response efforts among neighbors. In the Zoom chat, one attendee asked how they could warn others that ICE was in their area at that very moment.

DC residents are routinely reporting such sightings on ICEblock, an iPhone app tailor-made for locals to pinpoint ICE agents in real time. There’s also an emergency hotline (202-335-1183), which then shares the reports with the immigrant community. Beyond these dedicated spaces, I’m also seeing neighbors post sightings of law enforcement and police checkpoints on Nextdoor, which historically has been known as a watering hole for nosy neighbors and humdrum bigots, but in DC—at least recently—has turned into a space where people are trying to help strangers.

“On The Corner Of 4th And Rhode Island Ave RIGHT NOW,” one Nextdoor user posted alongside an image of an ICE-labeled vehicle on Thursday. “ICE is back in Mount Pleasant at Bancroft & Park Pleasant Apartments,” shared someone else. 

“You don’t need to do what I’m doing to be helpful,” Elli says of the various ways DC residents can warn their neighbors. “All you need is a phone.”