When I first started reading the Trump administration’s new executive order on homelessness — “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” — I thought it was essentially a restatement of longstanding regime policy. Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development had already effectively declared the end of federal Housing First policy, just as it had in his first term. Last week’s order states a preference for involuntary psychiatric treatment, but in the absence of any funding for new inpatient beds it struck me as more of an affective display than anything else. (Trump, in fact, recently signed a bill that cuts Medicaid by more than $900 billion, which would seem to take any expansion of inpatient psychiatric care for low-income people off the table.)
But I read deeper into the executive order with a feeling of mounting alarm. It soon became clear that this isn’t a directive for federal agencies to replace the “housing first” strategy with a set of more draconian “treatment first” policies. It’s not about housing or treatment at all. Instead, it appears to be about giving homeless citizens the ICE treatment.
The first clue is in this clause (emphasis mine):
(iv) enforce, and where necessary, adopt, standards that address individuals who are a danger to themselves or others and suffer from serious mental illness or substance use disorder, or who are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves, through assisted outpatient treatment or by moving them into treatment centers or other appropriate facilities via civil commitment or other available means, to the maximum extent permitted by law; or
What are those “other appropriate facilities” and “other available means?” The order doesn’t specify, but we get a clue later on:
(iii) assess Federal resources to determine whether they may be directed toward ensuring, to the extent permitted by law, that detainees with serious mental illness are not released into the public because of a lack of forensic bed capacity at appropriate local, State, and Federal jails or hospitals; and
The “Federal resources” cited in this section almost certainly include ICE immigrant detention centers, including the now infamous Alligator Auschwitz. I’m hard pressed to ascertain what else the above section could refer to.
I’ve seen a few people refer to this order as an attempt to “criminalize” homelessness, but that’s not quite right. As Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, criminals have procedural rights; the state is not supposed to unilaterally disappear them into concentration camps. They need to be charged and convicted. True, the state often violates the due process rights of suspected criminals, but those rights do exist as a matter of law and (for the most part) institutional reality.
The Trump administration has not criminalized immigration. In fact, it has made a point of targeting individuals who are not criminals. And it has repeatedly asserted its authority — with the enthusiastic assent of a rogue Supreme Court — to detain and dispose of immigrants as it sees fit, unbound by either criminal law or the Constitution itself. This is not criminalization but the attempted erasure of one’s legal and ethical status as a human being.
Now they’re proposing to do the same to our homeless neighbors.