The federal government is seeking to crack down on homelessness in the US, with Donald Trump issuing an executive order to push local governments to remove unhoused people from the streets.
The order the US president signed on Thursday will seek the “reversal of federal or state judicial precedents and the termination of consent decrees” that restrict local governments’ ability to force people into treatment for mental health, and redirect funds to support rehabilitation and treatment. The order aims to “restore public order”, saying “endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe”, according to the order.
The action comes as the homelessness crisis in the US has significantly worsened in recent years driven by a widespread shortage of affordable housing. Last year, a single-day count, which is a rough estimate, recorded more than 770,000 people experiencing homelessness across the country, the highest figure ever documented.
Cities and states have adopted an increasingly punitive approach to homelessness, seeking to push people out of parks and city streets, even when there is no shelter available. The supreme court ruled last year that cities can impose fines and even jail time for unhoused people for sleeping outside after local governments argued some protections for unhoused people prevented them from taking action to reduce homelessness.
Trump’s action seeks to move unhoused people to “long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment”, according to the order.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told USA Today, which first reported on the executive order, that the president was “delivering on his commitment to Make America Safe Again” and end homelessness.
“By removing vagrant criminals from our streets and redirecting resources toward substance abuse programs, the Trump administration will ensure that Americans feel safe in their own communities and that individuals suffering from addiction or mental health struggles are able to get the help they need,” she said.
The National Homelessness Law Center condemned the order, which it said “deprives people of their basic rights” and would ultimately worsen the problem.
“Today’s executive orders, combined with Maga’s budget cuts for housing and healthcare, will increase the number of people forced to live in tents, in their cars, and on the streets. This order does nothing to lower the cost of housing or help people make ends meet,” said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center.
The president’s order comes after last year’s US supreme court ruling, which was one of the most consequential legal decisions on homelessness in decades in the US.
That ruling held that it is not “cruel and unusual punishment” to criminalize camping when there is no shelter available. The case originated in Grants Pass, Oregon, a city that was defending its efforts to prosecute people for sleeping in public.
Unhoused people in the US have long faced crackdowns and sweeps, with policies and police practices that result in law enforcement harassment, tickets or jail time. But the ruling supercharged those kinds of aggressive responses, emboldening cities and states to punish encampment residents who have no other options for shelter.
In a report last month, the American Civil Liberties Union found that cities across the US have introduced more than 320 bills criminalizing unhoused people, the majority of which have passed. The crackdowns have taken place in Democratic- and Republican-run states alike.
Advocates for unhoused people’s rights have long argued that criminalization only exacerbates the housing crisis, shuffling people in and out of jail or from one neighborhood to the next, as they lose their belongings and connections to providers, fall further into debt and wind up in increasingly unsafe conditions.
During his campaign last year, Trump used dark rhetoric to talk about the humanitarian crisis, threatening to force people into “tent cities”, raising fears that some of the poorest, most vulnerable Americans could end up in remote locations in settings that resemble concentration camps.