The Biden-Harris administration is facing pressure from a top Republican lawmaker and the head of a federal law enforcement union, who accused it of looking the other way in response to a pro-Hamas protest on federal property in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
Rep. Bruce Westerman (R., Ark.), the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, fired off a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland late Wednesday saying that Park Police requested additional manpower prior to the protest, but that the Interior Department denied those requests. In his letter to Haaland, he said the brazen attacks on federal property are correlated to the failure of Interior's leadership to provide support.
Westerman, who visited the site of the protest later Wednesday evening alongside other GOP lawmakers, demanded that Haaland provide adequate resources to the U.S. Park Police, which are tasked with protecting federal property. Westerman's committee oversees Interior and its subagencies, including the National Park Service.
The chaotic protest at Union Station came in response to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address about his nation's ongoing war against Hamas to a joint session of Congress. During the protest, pro-Hamas agitators threw human feces at U.S. Park Police officers, burned an American flag, raised a Palestinian flag, and defaced several monuments with graffitied slogans such as "abolish the U.S.A" and "Hamas is coming." Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) on Thursday called for the Department of Justice to prosecute the offenders with the same vigor that it pursued the Jan. 6 rioters.
"It boiled my red American blood to see somebody take down the American flag and burn it and then raise the flag of a foreign country on a flagpole on public land. That crosses way past the free speech line, and it just infuriated me to tell you the truth," Westerman said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon.
"You wouldn't expect these people to have any respect for the rule of law or law enforcement officers," he continued. "I heard they were spit on, had human feces thrown at them. There were assaults. Thankfully, none of them had to be taken to the hospital. This was probably the worst thing the Park Police had to endure since the riots in 2020 when several of them did get injured and had to go to the hospital."
The Arkansas Republican said if any of the protesters are in the United States on visas or illegally entered the country, they should immediately be deported.
Westerman, who visited the site of the protest later Wednesday evening alongside other GOP lawmakers, added that Park Police requested additional manpower prior to the protest, but that the Interior Department denied those requests.
And according to Kenneth Spencer, the chairman of the U.S. Park Police's labor union, in addition to being denied resources on Wednesday, the police force has been significantly understaffed and lacks support from higher-ups at Interior. He noted that, overall, the police force has just 530 sworn personnel working across three major jurisdictions—Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and New York City.
"We were very fortunate that we didn't have any officers seriously injured or anything," Spencer told the Free Beacon. "But, we did have multiple assaults on police officers. We had, you know, objects being thrown at them, of course, the destruction of government property, and the vandalism and burning of flags. We were able to save one of the flags."
"When something like this happens and we're understaffed, it's a huge blow to the morale of my membership, because if we can't do our jobs properly, it ultimately falls on the officers that have their boots on the ground trying to do the hard work," Spencer said.
The National Park Service said in a statement to the Free Beacon that it didn't turn down any resource requests from Park Police, but declined to comment on Westerman's letter. The Department of the Interior didn't respond to a request for comment.