Hundreds of troops with the Washington DC National Guard mobilized to protect monuments in the country’s capital, a Pentagon spokesman confirmed.
Home Secretary David Bernhardt called for action earlier this week, as protesters attack statues and other historical markers during ongoing protests in the wake of George Floyd’s police custody death in Minneapolis in late May.
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The Pentagon confirmed that approximately 400 members of the DC Guard have been activated and are on standby.
“Since its activation, none of the National Guard members have been dispatched to royal memorial sites to provide assistance to the nuclear power plant,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Christian Mitchell said in a statement. “They are on hold at DC Armory right now. They will support the US Park Police. At key monuments to prevent any disfigurement or destruction.”
Mitchell said members of the National Guard are unarmed and “will serve as a uniform deterrent” and in a “crowd management capacity.”
Protesters tried on Monday to tear down a statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square next to the White House, and defaced it with the phrase “murderous scum,” Reuters reported. Bernhardt later said that he visited Lafayette Square and witnessed the destruction. He said that the country “will not bow to anarchists,” and that “law and order will prevail, and justice will be done.”
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The Lincoln Memorial and WWII Memorial were also defaced in previous protests.
During a Tuesday protest outside the DC Emancipation Monument, a protester announced that they would tear down the memorial statue of Abraham Lincoln standing on a freed slave on Thursday.
President Trump warned Tuesday morning that anyone caught destroying monuments or any other federal property would be subject to arrest and face up to 10 years in prison under federal law.
DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, meanwhile, announced a more formal move against the Emancipation Monument, declaring that she will introduce a bill calling for the statue to be removed from its home in Lincoln Park and placed in a museum.
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“Although previously enslaved Americans paid for the construction of this statue in 1876, the design and sculpture process was carried out without their input, and it shows,” Holmes Norton said in a statement. “The statue in no way notes how enslaved African Americans pressed for their own emancipation. Understandably, they were recently freed from slavery and appreciated any acknowledgment of their freedom.” He noted that at the statue’s presentation, keynote speaker Frederick Douglass “expressed displeasure” with it.
Morgan Phillips and Edmund DeMarche of Fox News contributed to this report.
