On a frigid December night in Washington, nearly two dozen people were gathered in a downtown office building to learn how to turn one of the most routine civic obligations — jury duty — into an opportunity for political activism.
The organizer of the meeting, a group known as Free DC, encouraged the attendees to be skeptical jurors, particularly as the Trump administration has increased the federal law enforcement presence in the District.
“As jurors, we have an enormous amount of power to decide whether this administration and its agenda are right — or wrong,” said Alex Dodds, a Free DC co-founder who attended the session.
The jury training session was among seven events that Free DC sponsored that week, evidence of how the organization is seeking to weave resistance into the fabric of the city as it faces a sweeping flex of federal authority.
Nearly a year after President Donald Trump’s return to Washington, Free DC has emerged as the city’s most prominent force of opposition as federal law enforcement, at the direction of the White House, has swept into neighborhoods and the Republican-controlled Congress has slashed local funding.
Free DC’s emerging influence can be measured in more ways than its signs and fliers, which have shown up in front yards and on utility poles across the city. The organization’s members visit Capitol Hill weekly to oppose congressional billsthat seek to block local laws or curtail the city’s autonomy. The group has trained residents on how to respond to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement if agents show up in their neighborhoods — and how to use smartphones to film the police.
As the city enters the 2026 election cycle, with voters poised to cast their ballots in a mayoral race, several council races and a U.S. House Delegate race, Free DC is also planning to use its influence to promote candidates.
Trump is nearly a year into his second term, and the impact of his return can felt in the presence of ICE agents and National Guard troops, mass federal layoffs and changes to the appearance of landmarks, including the addition of his name to the exterior of the Kennedy Center.
Free DC’s organizers said they find comfort in mounting a fight, particularly in a city that is uniquely vulnerable to federal interference.
“If they take away our rights, that doesn’t mean we don’t respond,” said Keya Chatterjee, one of the organization’s co-founders. “And you can see that every single time they have attacked D.C., we have responded.”
‘I think Trump’s going to win’
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly describedthe city as crime-ridden and dirty and threatened to take over governance of the capital if he won.
Chatterjee, an advisory neighborhood commissioner at the time, was part of a group of D.C. volunteers who traveled to Pennsylvania to knock on doors for Kamala Harris. On the bus ride back, she said, she saw Dodds, a local organizer, and told her she worried that Trump would win.
Concerned about the heightened intensity of Trump’s attacks on D.C., Chatterjee proposed organizing “neighborhood by neighborhood” to expand their network. She had read “Why Civil Resistance Works,” a book by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan which theorizes that successful nonviolent resistance movements against repressive regimes require only 3.5 percent of the population. In D.C., that’s about 24,500 people.
Dodds agreed to start a shared Google doc to come up with a plan. The project started to take shape as a five-year campaign focused on defending the city’s values and autonomy during a second Trump term.
The campaign’s name, “Free DC,” had been Marion Barry’s rallying cry in the 1960s, when the future D.C. mayor was a young civil rights leader; Congress, fearful of rising Black political power, had killed a bill that would have given city residents the right to elect their own mayor and legislature.
The name appealed to Nee Nee Taylor, a longtime D.C. organizer who believed that the District’s limited autonomy was linked to a legacy of racism. “D.C. is enslaved,” she said. “We’re not free.”
Taylor asked Barry’s wife, Cora Masters Barry, for permission to use the name, and she agreed. “Free DC should be something like ‘God bless America’ — you should be able to say it any time, any place with anybody,” Cora Masters Barry said in an interview.
Free DC’s four co-founders — Chatterjee, Dodds, Taylor and Kelsye Adams — officially launched the group in January, during the weekend of Trump’s second inauguration, with the goal of mobilizing more than 24,000 D.C. residents to push back against federal interference in local affairs.
‘2020 was checkers. We have to play chess.’
One of the group’s first challenges came in March when a congressional budget bill was poised to abruptly cut more than $1 billion from the city’s budget in the middle of a fiscal year. D.C. officials feared that they would have to cut funding for schools and public safety.Republican House members who proposed the cuts offered little explanation, saying only that the D.C. government should be treated like federal agencies, which were ordered to maintain funding levels from the previous year.
Free DC helped mobilize hundreds of residents to the halls of Congress, visiting every lawmaker’s office more than once. In the end, after pressure from D.C.’s elected officials and residents, the Senate unanimously voted to restore the funds.
Chatterjee was buoyed by the experience. To her, it showed that “we are revealing the way that D.C. is treated so unfairly, and we are making the case — successfully at many times — that we are human beings that deserve equal rights.”
But the House, which needed to approve the Senate’s action, never voted to fix D.C.’s budget; it was only by using a 2009 law as a workaround that D.C. leaders were able to avoid drastic reductions to city services.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, continued to act on the president’s threats, sending immigration enforcement agents and National Guard troops into neighborhoods across the city.
Free DC tried to meet the moment, instructing residents on what to do when they saw an immigration arrest and how to assert their rights if confronted by law enforcement. They organized volunteers to station themselves along children’s routes to school — to provide young people with friendly faces if they saw armed National Guard troops on their path.
The group emerged as among the city’s most vocal critics of Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), contending that she should have more forcefully opposed Trump’s incursion and stopped local law enforcement from patrolling alongside immigrationagents. Bowser and her allies countered that the mayor had made a strategic choice to avoid provoking Trump and inviting even more federal aggression.
Free DC organized a march of thousands down 16th Street in September to oppose Trump’s law enforcement takeover. For the most part, though, the group has not staged large-scale protests or marches, in part because organizers learned that that form of resistance resulted in little concrete change following the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“2020 was checkers,” Taylor said. “We have to play chess with this government.”
‘Get in where you fit in’
Now, Free DC is aggressively working to expand its reach to that 24,000-person threshold, through Ward-level committees across the city and issue-based working groups. The organizers declined to say how close they are to that number, but said they had engaged thousands of residents and had sold more than 10,000 Free DC T-shirts as of December.
Samantha Trumbull, a D.C. resident since 2012, now spends about two days a week on Capitol Hill as the co-chair of Free DC’s Congress committee.
“We do try to make sure that if we are the subject of a hearing or a meeting, or they’re taking a vote about a D.C. issue in a committee, that we are there to bear witness,” Trumbull said. “The members of Congress don’t get to pretend like they’re the only people who live here.”
Trumbull became a casualty of the administration’s policy choices this year, when she said she reluctantly took a deferred resignation offer and left her job at the Agriculture Department. Her work with Free DC, she said, “has really become a lifeline,” giving her a purpose at a time when she needed one.
Other working groups focus on the arts or direct action. One new committee, created in November, will focus on elections: Free DC plans to endorse candidates in next year’s city races, said Dodds, a former staffer for Council member Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4), who is running to succeed Bowser.
Samantha Davis, a Ward 8 resident who works largely on youth advocacy, is a co-leader for one of two Free DC teams in Wards 7 and 8, majority Black communities that have been deeply affected by the surge of federal law enforcement. When she recently hosted a know-your-rights training at Kramer Middle School in Anacostia, Davis said, “young people named, without any prompting, their experiences with federal agents jumping out on them and their family members while they are in their own community, just being together.”
Still, Davis acknowledged that the group’s numbers in Wards 7 and 8 are lower than in more affluent parts of the city.
“Not everyone is going to be able to go lobby on the Hill in the middle of the day,” she said. Instead, she said, the group has to focus on making sure everyone has the opportunity to participate. “It really is just this mindset of — get in where you fit in.”
Council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large) said the organizing chops of Free DC’s co-founders allowed them to “harness the moment.”
“It gave residents a place to channel some of their energy, whether it be the protests, or the visits they did on the Hill, or the court watch services they had been doing,” Henderson said. “There were a lot of folks in D.C. who felt very frustrated and very upset and very angry, and didn’t necessarily know how to channel that energy.”
But after a year of Free DC’s activism, Republicans in Congress, along with Trump, seem no more willing to mollify Washingtonians.
As long as Trump is president, Taylor said, she’s sure the city won’t gain statehood, among the long-term goals for Free DC and other advocates. But she knows residents can continue to fight to maintain home rule and oppose the presence of the National Guard and other attempts to undermine the city’s autonomy.
That way, even if that power gets taken, “we just didn’t turn over and be like, here — take our government, take our home rule, take our decisions,” Taylor said.
In August, four days after Trump announced his takeover of D.C. police, the whole stadium at a Washington Spirit soccer game chanted “Free DC” during the entire 51st minute — a time-stamp that symbolizes D.C.’s quest to become the 51st state.
It was a reminder, Chatterjee said, that “we own the cultural landscape of D.C.”
“It is ours,” she said, “and they can’t have it.”
Meagan Flynn contributed to this report.
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