Under Mayor Muriel Bowser, the District of Columbia government has given thousands of dollars in grant money meant to combat gun violence in the nation’s crime-ridden capital to an array of social justice causes.
Some of the questionable, taxpayer-funded spending supported an LGBT opera, a transgender youth program, and immigration activists aiding antideportation efforts, a Washington Examiner review of government grant records found.
For fiscal 2024, the district’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement awarded a batch of “mini-grants,” totaling $135,000, geared toward initiatives that “directly contribute to the prevention of gun violence” in Washington.
Many Languages One Voice, an immigrant justice nonprofit organization advocating the end of immigration detention, was one of 27 groups granted $5,000 each for gun violence prevention programming from the district’s public safety office.
MLOV partners with Sanctuary DMV, an “anti-imperialist” collective seeking to defund the district’s Metropolitan Police Department and abolish all Virginia prisons. As part of an activism network, Sanctuary DMV recruits, trains, and dispatches rapid responders to disrupt deportation operations in the region.
ONE IN THREE DC ARRESTS THIS WEEK WERE IMMIGRATION-RELATED
Amid mass Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, the two cohorts took part in a pressure campaign demanding that Bowser ensure, per sanctuary city policy, that the MPD does not cooperate with federal immigration authorities and will defy ICE detainers requesting advance notification of a criminally charged immigrant’s release from jail.
MLOV also assists illegal immigrants at risk of deportation, accompanying clients to immigration court and connecting them with legal representation. Through training sessions and practice scenarios, MLOV teaches illegal immigrants what to do when interrogated by ICE.
In the spring of 2024, Bowser distributed $330,000 in “mini-grants” districtwide via the Office of Gun Violence Prevention to 31 community-based programs purportedly aimed at curbing gun-related crimes.
Get Her to the B.A.G., or “Black Assertive Goals-Getters,” a black empowerment group, was awarded $5,000 to host a wealth and tea retreat in Ward 8’s Congress Heights, a high-crime Washington neighborhood where 38 homicides have happened this year, according to MPD data. That is almost 10 times as many murders as in Ward 2, home to the National Mall.
According to Urban Social, an advertising directory dedicated to “black, brown, and indigenous businesses,” Get Her to the B.A.G. retreats involve “vulva anatomy arts and crafts,” lessons about “womb health,” sound bath meditation, and herbal tea samples.
Since 2023, Get Her to the B.A.G. has received a total of $40,000, including two $15,000 “mini-plus grants,” in gun violence prevention funding for these “B.A.G. Girl Summer” wellness summits.
In 2023, one of the $5,000 gun violence prevention grants financed a three-part “Queer gun destruction opera.” The performance, featuring themes of “queer identity,” explored the process of gun transformation through sound in Act I, put on a gun-melting ceremony in Act II, and culminated in an opera in Act III imagining a world in which all guns are transformed into instruments and artwork, specifically “sonic structures.”
As part of the musical score, composed from the sound of recast firearms, singers chanted “Queeremos,” meaning “queering.” Community allies publicized the production as a “woke affront to the gun lobby.”
“How can we, the LGBTQ+ community, take the tools of the oppressors and transform them into music and art?” said showrunner Stephanie Mercedes, “a local uncategorized Queer Latinx artist” whose work has been funded by the Soros-owned Open Society Foundations.
Mercedes, a former OSF fellow focused on achieving “radical justice,” charged up to $50 a ticket to attend the event series.
Bowser’s Office on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Affairs approved a $50,000 grant, earmarked in part for ending gun violence, that helped a gay activism group build out its after-school LGBT center on Capitol Hill last year.
Under the auspices of the yearlong grant, the Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League further developed “Little SMYALs,” an “affirmation”-centered kindergarten-through-eighth grade program divided into two age groups, “Unicorns” and “Rainbows.” Little SMYALs, which enrolls children as young as 6, is one of the only initiatives of its kind in the country designed to reach children this young, SMYAL said in the grant proposal submitted to the mayor’s community outreach arm.
To qualify for the grant, as the opportunity notice stipulated, an applicant’s area of service must meet at least one of the mayoral benchmarks, which Bowser outlined in her “DC’s Comeback” postelection plan. On the grant application, SMYAL marked the K-8 program’s purpose as fulfilling one of these third-term funding priorities: “End[ing] Gun Violence.”
During the funding period, Bowser’s office asked SMYAL to describe a programmatic achievement accomplished in the second quarter. As an example of the program’s “efficacy,” SMYAL shared a “success story” of one of the “Unicorns,” an 8-year-old girl whom Little SMYALs staffers encouraged to transition genders.
According to the quarterly activity report, Little SMYALs manager Taryn “Ty” Kitchen, a “nonbinary” educator, “coached” the child to come out as transgender within weeks of enrollment. A majority of the grant money went toward wages, paying in particular for one-fifth, or $12,000, of Kitchen’s paychecks.
Kitchen, who recently underwent “gender-affirming surgery,” a double mastectomy, wrote in an article for the Advocate, an LGBT magazine, that she hopes to serve as a mentor for children to model themselves after, “a potential version” of their “future self.” Little SMYALs, which partners with the gender clinic at Children’s National Hospital, also places program participants on a path to medical transitioning.
SMYAL and the other awardees “advance D.C. values,” Bowser touted at the time of the grant’s dispersal. The investments “reinforce Mayor Bowser’s commitment to revitalize D.C.’s Downtown,” added Jackie Reyes-Yanes, director of the Mayor’s Office of Community Affairs.
Gun crime, meanwhile, continues to be a persistent problem in Washington.
According to OGVP’s real-time gun violence dashboard, so far this year, 878 gun-related offenses, which include assaults with a deadly weapon, homicides, robberies, and sexual abuse, have been committed across the district.
BOWSER DISMISSES NEED FOR STATE TROOPS BEING SENT TO DC
Ward 8, spanning the areas of Congress Heights and Anacostia, has the highest year-to-date number, 246, of gun crimes.
The Washington Examiner contacted Bowser’s office for comment.
