While President Donald Trump cracks down on crime in Washington, D.C., federalizing the police force and mobilizing the National Guard, the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser (D.), left town for the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, according to her office’s statement to the Washington Free Beacon and media reports.
“The Mayor has a family commitment and had to pick up her daughter. She will return to the District tomorrow,” Bowser’s office told the Free Beacon in a statement Thursday. Multiple reports, including from Fox 5 News and Rolling Stone, have stated the mayor’s destination is Martha’s Vineyard.
Bowser’s office did not respond to the Free Beacon‘s further questions on what family commitment the mayor is honoring by leaving her city for the wealthy, heavily Democratic island.
D.C. has made national headlines amid Trump’s crime crackdown in the city. Trump on Monday announced that he is sending in the National Guard and federal law enforcement agencies and placing the district’s police department under federal control to “reestablish law, order, and public safety” in the nation’s capital. The president said that crime is “out of control” in the city and vowed to “put it in control very quickly, like we did on the southern border.”
The mayor has slammed Trump’s Monday moves as not only “unsettling and unprecedented” but also part of an “authoritarian push,” claiming that her city is not experiencing a crime surge.
While crime in the district has fallen since last year, when the city council reversed its stance on criminal justice reform and passed a tough-on-crime bill, the district has long struggled with high rates of violent crime and saw spikes as recently as 2023, with homicides up 35 percent, robberies up 67 percent, and carjackings up 82 percent that year.
On Thursday, the same day that Bowser left the city, D.C. police chief Pamela Smith issued an order that partially walks back the city’s sanctuary city policies, which have long prohibited local officials from assisting ICE in immigration enforcement. Smith authorized officers to alert federal immigration authorities about individuals not in custody and help ICE transport detained suspects, though the rules remain unchanged for individuals who have been arrested.
Martha’s Vineyard also made headlines in recent years over illegal immigration. In September 2022, Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) sent two planes of roughly 50 Venezuelan migrants to the island to highlight Democratic-led cities’ sanctuary laws, prompting accusations of hypocrisy when residents protested and the Massachusetts National Guard escorted the migrants off the island.
Bowser isn’t the only Democratic mayor absent during a recent public crisis. Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass earlier this year remained in Ghana, where she was attending a cocktail party, as wildfires escalated in her city.
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