Al Jazeera Podcasts.

Today, hundreds of troops patrol Washington, D.C. streets under Trump's orders, and more are coming.

This is not normal. This is what happens in a dictatorship. And I want to be clear that

that is what is happening here. Are they making residents feel safer? I'm Malika Bilal and this

is The Take. My name is Fa Chatterjee, and I am the executive director of FreeD.C.

Kea, welcome to The Take. You are in Washington, D.C., one of the places I call home. It's the capital of the United States. And right now, under U.S. President Donald Trump,

soldiers and masked federal agents are roaming the streets in the name of controlling crime.

Set the scene for us. What have the streets been like? What have they look like over the past few

days?

Well, there are parts that actually look totally normal, but then there are other parts in random times when, you know, black men, brown men are scooped up, thrown into cars,

and that are just driving away. Sometimes there's not license plates on the cars. Often the men

kidnapping them are unlabeled. They're armed.

You know, we've seen people expecting food deliveries and delivery drivers being tackled to the ground,

literally put in chains, like chains around their waists and put into cars.

It's really, in some cases, very unclear who these people are.

There are massive illegal checkpoints all over the place, stopping vehicles,

just stopping people from moving around, huge FBI presence all over the place.

We're seeing particular targeting of returning citizens,

of houseless people, of immigrants.

But it's just, you know, it's just basically constantly people getting detained.

And so it's happening in ways that are clearly meant to incite fear.

Yeah. in ways that are clearly meant to incite fear.

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