U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s order naming a federal official as the emergency police commissioner of the District of Columbia’s police department, and rescinding an executive order from the department, is not legal, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb said on Aug. 14.
“It is my opinion that the Bondi Order is unlawful, and that you are not legally obligated to follow it,” Schwalb told Pamela Smith, the police chief of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), in a missive released by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bondi, in her order on Thursday, named Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Terry Cole as the emergency police commissioner of the MPD.
She also rescinded an Aug. 14 executive order from the MPD that prohibited police officers from querying a person’s immigration status and arresting people based solely on federal immigration warrants.
That order also prohibited officers from providing information to federal immigration agencies about people in MPD custody.
Schwalb said that while it is an act of Congress, the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 lets a president direct the D.C. mayor to provide services to MPD but “does not authorize the president, or his delegee, to remove or replace the Chief of Police” or “to alter the chain of command within MPD.”
The federal government also does not have the power to demand services from MPD, to rescind or suspend MPD orders, or to “otherwise determine how the District pursues purely local law enforcement,” he said.
“Let us be clear about what the law requires during a Presidential declared emergency: it requires the mayor of Washington, D.C., to provide the services of the Metropolitan Police Department for federal purposes at the request of the President. We have followed the law,” Bowser said.
“In reference to the U.S. Attorney General’s order, there is no statute that conveys the District’s personnel authority to a federal official.”
President Donald Trump on Aug. 11 activated National Guard troops and sent them to Washington, citing the D.C. Home Rule Act. He said that Bondi would be “taking command of” MPD and that Cole would be designated its interim federal commissioner.
The D.C. Home Rule Act states in part that “whenever the President of the United States determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist which require the use of the Metropolitan Police force for Federal purposes, he may direct the Mayor to provide him, and the Mayor shall provide, such services of the Metropolitan Police force as the President may deem necessary and appropriate.”
