By Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb filed a lawsuit on Friday challenging U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempt to take control of the district’s police department, in a move likely to escalate the tensions between the city’s leadership and the Trump administration.
Schwalb said the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, aims to get the court to rule that Trump’s takeover of the city’s police department is illegal.
It came just hours after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued an order transferring control of the police department from the city to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s leader Terry Cole, whom Bondi tapped to serve as the Metropolitan Police Department’s Emergency Commissioner.
Trump said on Monday he was deploying hundreds of National Guard troops to Washington and temporarily taking over the city’s police department to curb what he has depicted as a crime emergency in the U.S. capital, though statistics show incidents of violent crime have dropped.
As part of that action, federal law enforcement agencies including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Customs and Border Patrol have deployed agents to patrol the streets and carry out arrests.
Bondi’s order, issued late on Thursday, said the city must receive approval from Cole before it can issue any directives to the Washington police force. It also sought to rescind several of the police department’s prior directives, including one that addressed its level of involvement with federal immigration enforcement.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not have any immediate comment on the lawsuit’s claims, which called Bondi’s actions a “brazen usurpation of the District’s authority over its own government.”
(Reporting by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama )
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