It was a warm, early autumn day in D.C. as Sam O’Hara trailed several National Guard members.
It had been several weeks since President Donald Trump had declared a “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital and deployed federal troops. On three separate occasions O’Hara had taken to playing “The Imperial March” as a Star Wars-inspired peaceful protest, recorded and uploaded to O’Hara’s social media accounts.
Passersby can be heard saying “May the force be with you” and several guardsmen smiled or laughed at O’Hara’s satirist opposition.
That is, until Sept. 11, 2025, when Sgt. Devon Beck, a guardsman from Ohio, took umbrage to O’Hara’s Darth Vader-esque comparison.
“Hey man, if you’re going to keep following us, we can contact Metro PD and they can come handle you if that’s what you want to do. Is that what you want to do?” the sergeant said, per the lawsuit.
While called up and activated on Title 32 status to participate in the Safe and Beautiful Task Force, troops deployed to D.C. can not make arrests but can briefly detain people until police are brought in.
Within 30 minutes of the interaction, O’Hara had been cuffed by the police. He was ultimately not charged and released but the incident set off a monthslong lawsuit between O’Hara, the district, several D.C. police officers and Beck, with the D.C. resident alleging that his First Amendment and Forth Amendment rights had been violated.
The ACLU announced on Friday that it had reached an undisclosed financial agreement with the D.C. government and four of its officers. Still pending, however, is the part of O’Hara’s lawsuit directed at Beck.
“On each of the three occasions, Mr. O’Hara did not touch Guard members or interfere in their operations,” the lawsuit reads. “Mr. O’Hara initiated his protests only when he saw Guard members engaged in operations consisting entirely of walking on patrol, as opposed to incidents where Guard members were actively involved in supporting law enforcement. And, on each occasion, Mr. O’Hara walked behind the Guard members for only a few minutes.”
Beck is being represented by lawyers at the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office who filed a motion to dismiss back in April.
O’Hara’s complaint, the attorneys wrote, sought to hold the National Guardsman liable “for simply requesting police assistance while performing a federal support mission as an on-duty guardsman.”
“When followed, distracted, and harassed by plaintiff,” they continued, he “did the very thing the mission contemplated: he called local law enforcement to conduct their own investigation and to address the matter as they saw fit.”
In its original submission, the ACLU-filed court documents dispute such claims, stating “The law might have tolerated government conduct of this sort a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But in the here and now, the First Amendment bars government officials from shutting down peaceful protests, and the Fourth Amendment (along with the District’s prohibition on false arrest) bars groundless seizures.”
The military was controversially brought into the city last August to support law enforcement’s “efforts to restore law and order,” according to a memo signed by U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll.
Despite the presence of more than 2,000 National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., since last August, it has had “no measurable effect on violent crime,” according to a recent Niskanen Center report.
“The National Guard was deployed primarily in high-visibility public spaces, exactly the locations where opportunistic property crime tends to occur and where visible deterrence is most likely to be effective,” the authors wrote. “A uniformed presence in tourist corridors and transit hubs is unlikely to interrupt a dispute between individuals with preexisting ties on their own turf. The Guard’s footprint was simply misaligned with the geography of violence.”
Robbery and other violent crimes in Washington, D.C., have also seen a downward trend that predates the deployment, the report reads, and the operation did not impact that trajectory.
National Guard troop levels have surged in recent weeks from slightly over 2,500 to 4,600 in anticipation of the Fourth of July and America 250 events in the ensuing days and weeks.
O’Hara, in an interview with the Washington Post, told the outlet that he has no plans to stop his protests.
So, amid the festivities, the low thrumming of “The Imperial March” from O’Hara’s phone just might be in the mix as well.
Tanya Noury contributed to this report.
Claire Barrett is an editor and military history correspondent for Military Times. She is also a World War II researcher with an unparalleled affinity for Sir Winston Churchill and Michigan football.