Trump Administration Says It’s Going To Start To Locking Up Homeless People

from the he’s-no-Reagan-but-I-bet-Jodie-Foster-would-be-impressed-anyway dept

We’ve finally got a Stalin to call our own. Just like Soviet Russia, homelessness is now basically a criminal offense, thanks to Trump’s latest executive order, which pretends it’s about crime but actually just wants to put homelessness people in places where other Americans won’t be inconvenienced by them.

Like most Trump executive orders, it’s got Orwell all over it:

“Ending Crime And Disorder On America’s Streets”

What’s the crime and disorder so troubling it needs yet another executive order that further expands the power of US law enforcement past the troubling amount it already possesses? Tough to say, since it’s the president saying it, and he’s never been great with words. Even with ghostwriters, this is barely coherent:

Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe.  The number of individuals living on the streets in the United States on a single night during the last year of the previous administration — 274,224 — was the highest ever recorded.  The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both.  Nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having regularly used hard drugs like methamphetamines, cocaine, or opioids in their lifetimes.  An equally large share of homeless individuals reported suffering from mental health conditions.  The Federal Government and the States have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats.

Yep. Drink that all in. DID YOU VOTE FOR THIS, REGRETFUL TRUMP VOTERS?

The first sentence does a lot of conflation in service of the ultimate goal. It also does the usual bloodlust thing where it pretends US crime rates are the worst they’ve ever been while not-so-slyly insinuating the (made-up) crime problem is the result of too much compassion towards the less-fortunate.

The conflation is followed by stats that aren’t supported by any citations. And that’s followed by two compounded assertions (again, without citations to supporting facts) that most homeless people are both (1) addicted to hard drugs, and (2) suffering from mental health conditions.

The final claim is the lousiest, at least in this context. Trump claims the government has wasted billions of dollars trying to “address” homelessness while never bothering to examine the root causes. Trump expects you to just sort of ride that wave of bullshit into the next paragraph — one that reveals Trump will also spend billions of dollars without addressing the root causes of homelessness!

Brace yourself. It gets ugly almost immediately.

Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order.  Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens.  My Administration will take a new approach focused on protecting public safety.

Hell yeah, we’re bringing back involuntary commitment! (Maybe the draft will be next!) It’s time to exhume John Kellogg and see if he can’t enema the homelessness out of the homeless. Or, more likely, we’ll just see whether it’s possible to torture the homeless out of people in federal institutions that are only indistinguishable from prisons by the orderlies’ willingness to be even more inhumane than the average screw.

It’s clear Trump prefers the indefinite discomfort of the unhoused to the momentary “disorder and fear” he claims routinely bother citizens who actually have houses and acceptable levels of substance abuse. It’s unclear where all of these unhoused people will be forcibly housed because the man who laid the groundwork for this hateful brand of conservatism basically burned that system to the ground during his eight years in office.

(Trust me, there are also a lot of eugenics enthusiasts behind this resurrection of forcible commitment because throwing “subpar” humans into inhumane circumstances has always put the lead in their pencil. This administration has no shortage of people with a head full of bad wiring willing to push people out the Overton window for the next four years, knowing there’s a pardon in their future if they happen to go a bit too Special-K during this particular purge.)

First against the wall en route to the padded room:

(i)    enforce prohibitions on open illicit drug use;

(ii)   enforce prohibitions on urban camping and loitering;

(iii)  enforce prohibitions on urban squatting;

Legalize weed all you want but it’s still a federal crime, so get used to being abused, pot smokers who look possibly unable to pay rent. As to anyone else not fortunate enough to have a roof over your head, you’ll soon have one, even though it won’t actually be anyplace anyone would willingly call “home.”

This is just ground work, which is ghastly considering how awful it already is. There’s an undercurrent that suggests anyone not living in the way the Trump government wants them to probably has mental health issues. Nothing in this order suggests the erection of affordable multi-family housing might reduce homelessness. Nothing in the order suggests expanding the social service safety net might prevent more people from becoming homeless. That vacuum is instead filled with presumptions about the inherent dangerousness of homeless people, which allows the administration to justify them being detained en masse and tossed into whatever federal institution is still semi-operable.

The only mention of funds being allocated are directed solely towards”removal” efforts targeting homeless people. The only mention of addressing mental health issues is a series of restrictions that threaten to remove even more funding from existing social programs if they can’t demonstrate (using getting-set-up-for-failure metrics) what they do actually reduces homelessness.

Most specifically, the administration says there will be no additional funds allocated for actually providing housing for people currently without homes.

These actions shall include, to the extent permitted by law, ending support for “housing first” policies that deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency.

“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” says the Trump administration, which first takes your boots because you’re probably just using them to stash drugs and then your bootstraps because you might try to hang yourself with them.

Now that Trump has decided it’s okay to lock up the homeless for being homeless while pretending it’s all about providing (forcibly applied) mental health care, it’s only a matter of time before he moves on to the rest of the people he thinks are sick in the head, ranging from transgender people seeking psychiatric assistance to political opponents he routinely publicly disparages as insane, stupid, or otherwise mentally deficient.

This is undiluted evil from an administration that’s no longer even willing to pretend its ultimate goal is to secure their existence and a future for whatever children are considered white enough to be given an opportunity to thrive in the former Land of the Free — a downhill slope greased with the blood of the less fortunate, overseen by an administration that is nothing more than a bunch of greasy, overfed thumbs pressing down on the scales of justice.

Filed Under: evil, executive order, homelessness, social services, trump administration