On August 24, 2025, as my wife, Shubha, and I were driving home, we saw from a distance, clearly on the block in front of our house, the now routine (in DC) circus of a cluster of vehicles with flashing blue lights pulsing along half the length of our block.
We parked in the next block and as we walked toward our home, we saw our beloved ninety-one-year-old Black neighbor and a great-grandchild who lives with her hovering, obviously in agonized distress, on her porch.
I immediately went up to her to see what was happening—a young male relative who had been coming to visit had been detained.
There were at least FIVE law-enforcement vehicles and too many officers to count just milling about—including a masked female FBI officer who simply watched us with cold, vacant eyes as we walked past her toward our house. The FBI? Why the FBI? Have they caught a terrorist?
After comforting our neighbor, I was coming down her steps to confront the authorities when the young man—tall, handsome, but obviously shaken—was walking toward me. Turns out he had been followed—ACTUALLY STALKED—for several blocks by an extended caravan of law enforcement vehicles before he was stopped.
Why? We then learned that his girlfriend’s car, which he had been driving, had an expired registration sticker. For this he was detained for an extended time by officers from at least two agencies, questioned at length, frisked, and both his person, and the vehicle—every item in it—searched painstakingly before he was, finally, released with a ticket.
The FBI is now using its authority to track down expired automobile registrations.
This never would have happened before the Occupation.
Traffic along major arteries is routinely reduced to an interminable crawl with checkpoints. Many fellow DC residents have endured these outrageous tactics.
Helicopters hover endlessly over neighborhoods of color at night, as in a war zone, with no apparent purpose other than making their presence known.
Packs of law-enforcement vehicles cruise the city in what are simply hunting parties–as in our neighbor’s case—looking only for expired stickers, or broken tail-lights, or any other pretext for harassment of what are overwhelmingly people of color in our city.
As the young man said with simple eloquence, his eyes shining in the darkness:
“This is not right.”
The Hill Rag publishes opinion pieces from a variety of view points. Submissions can be sent to editorial@hillrag.com. The views in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Hill Rag.
