A judge rained on Donald Trump’s crime crackdown parade when she released from a youth holding facility two teens charged in connection with the alleged assault of a former DOGE staffer.
The teens, a boy and a girl, both 15 and from Maryland, had been held at Washington, D.C.’s Youth Services Center since being charged in an alleged carjacking assault in the city on August 3.
The case caught Trump’s attention, who said the 19-year-old victim, Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, was “beaten mercilessly.”
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But Joe Biden-appointed Judge Kendra Briggs ordered the teens out of detention and back to their caretakers, imposing conditions that include electronic monitoring, a 24-hour curfew, and no contact with each other, The Washington Post reported.
The decision will almost certainly outrage Trump, who celebrated what he described as his administration’s crackdown on crime. “Washington D.C. will soon be great again!!!” he wrote on Truth Social.
“School and home, that’s it,” Briggs told the teens in a hearing Thursday in D.C. Superior Court.“ The fact that this court is stepping you down from Youth Services Center is a serious step.”
Briggs said she’d immediately set an emergency hearing should there be any violations.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
The news inflamed right-wing commentators and pundits, who expressed their frustrations on X.
Right-wing commentator Eric Daugherty expressed his disbelief at the decision and Briggs, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden.
“WTF: DEI Judge Kendra Briggs, appointed by Joe Biden, RELEASED the violent youth attackers of DOGE’s Big Balls from juvenile custody in Washington DC. The placement of these judges all across our nation is doing irreparable harm,” he wrote on X.
Daugherty added, “Now these thugs will learn no actual lesson and go out and do it again, potentially with a weapon, and their next victim may not survive like Big Balls did.”
Another right-wing influencer, Gunther Eagleman, said Briggs “needs to be removed” in a savage takedown on X.
“Meet Biden appointed DEI Judge Kendra Briggs,” he wrote. “This political hack has RELEASED the violent youth attackers that beat DOGE’s Big Balls from juvenile custody in DC.”
MAGA-aligned pundit Nick Sortor chimed in, branding the two teens “delinquents” and demanding they be “taken into FEDERAL CUSTODY if possible.”
“They have NO BUSINESS on the streets of DC!” he wrote on X.
Trump hasn’t publicly addressed the decision, but said Thursday that “crowds are coming back, the spirit is high, and our D.C. National Guard and Police are doing a fantastic job.”
The White House declared a “crime emergency” in D.C. this month while Trump claimed that crime in the nation’s capital was “out of control,” despite police data showing that violent crime in Washington dropped to a three-decade low last year.
Police are continuing to investigate the Coristine assault. The Metropolitan Police Department released photos of a person of interest on August 7 and urged anyone with information to come forward.
