by Cathleen Williams and Sandy Perry
Washington DC, August 12, 2025: “Yesterday, I walked from the White House through the National Mall… The streets are eerily empty for an August afternoon near the storied monuments. In some places, there are more ICE, DEA, ARNG, and FBI personnel than there are regular people. There are fire trucks blocking lanes of traffic for no reason. There are Humvees sitting outside of Union Station for no reason other than to terrorize people–to let *us know that we are being watched…” Facebook post, Mia Michelle McClain
In a naked assertion of police power, the Trump administration has moved to occupy Washington D.C. In its opening paragraphs, the Executive Order that launched the attack called for the involuntary “institutionalization”—actually, the mass incarceration—of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our nation, the people who live outside, called homeless but making their homes, as best they can, in encampments along the freeways and open spaces of the city.
Trump’s armed attack is the latest expression of a nationwide campaign to isolate, demonize and criminalize unhoused people, but it is far more than that. It attempts to defy, reverse, and defeat our struggle, led by working class people, for unity around the right to housing and other basic needs—our very struggle for justice, equality, and democracy under the U.S. Constitution —the rights that our forefathers won by fighting the American Revolution and the Civil War against human enslavement. It achieves this by creating “outsider” classes, like unhoused people, undocumented people, trans people—and especially Black youth. They should have no rights and no right to have rights.
This is why African American-led and so-called “sanctuary” cities have been singled out for attack. Every resident of low-income housing is under threat with the Executive Order’s call to “get rid of the slums” without regard to the people living there. And finally, the order to fine or jail any homeless resident who fails to leave the city or enter a shelter (when there are literally no beds available) is an all-out assault on the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Resistance began immediately. In Washington, mutual aid groups like Miriam’s Kitchen sprang into action, assisting unhoused encampment residents during city sweeps, and struggling to open new shelters and safeguard people from arrest. Free DC, a community organization originally formed to protest abuses by Biden, immediately organized resistance to Trump. It led nightly pot-banging demonstrations, morning and afternoon school support teams to protect vulnerable students, and an Adopt a Curfew Zone to protect youth targeted by Trump-directed police.
Trump has made no secret of the current strategy of the billionaire class that is ruling our nation: intensify the divisions among working class people by targeting different populations and subjecting each to police violence, drawing upon the vile ideologies of white supremacy, fascism, hatred of the LBGTQ+ community, and of migrants and immigrants. Mass deportations. Mass incarceration. There is a method to the madness: the Trump attacks on the unhoused are a calculated campaign against the movement for a right to housing for all poor working class people.
Driving a Wedge
Trump’s July 24 Executive Order on homelessness explicitly lies that the problem is one of “crime and disorder on America’s streets”. It deliberately refuses to mention the real cause of homelessness—unaffordable rents—and openly calls for cancellation of the “Housing First” program that moves people into permanent housing. Instead of ending homelessness and reducing rents by allocating more money, the administration has called for massive cuts to existing Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Department programs at the same time it is ramping up sweeps and expulsions.
Deliberately separating the homelessness and housing issues serves the “real estate industrial complex”, which has sabotaged government affordable housing policy for over a century, to prevent competition and preserve its exorbitant rents. This real estate bloc wields immense power politically—Trump himself made many billions from real estate—as it preys on vulnerable working class people teetering on the edge of dispossession. What is rent but a private “tax” for one of life’s necessities? Why can’t we build public and social housing the way we build freeways and roads? The plan is to divide unhoused people from housed people with vicious lies and innuendos, to turn people’s well-grounded fears that homelessness could happen to them into a visceral hatred of the unhoused themselves.
The Trump call for “getting rid of the people from underpasses and public spaces” and forcing unhoused people to “move out IMMEDIATELY …. FAR from the Capital” is reminiscent of Nazi “beautification” programs. So-called “Asocials” were sent to concentration camps where they were starved and worked to death. By stigmatizing the unhoused, they terrorize the hundreds of millions of other Americans who are at risk of homelessness, and discourage them from uniting in the common struggle against the dictatorship.
Common Humanity
Our strategy has to be to unite renters with the movement to end homelessness to win housing for all. Unhoused people and their families are allies of the nation’s 45 million renters in this struggle. The current offensive that began with the 2024 Grants Pass Supreme Court decision. The Gavin Newsom sham Care Court scheme for court-ordered “treatment” of mental disability, and his order to dismantle California encampments, was next. Now, HUD Secretary Scott Turner is calling out unhoused people for their “cycle of dependency”, as if the great majority of them have not worked hard for most of their lives. As if America’s shortage of 7.1 million extremely low-income homes doesn’t even exist. As if people are lazy because they can’t work the 116 hours a week that minimum wage employees need to be able to afford rent for a two-bedroom apartment.
None of this is true. Unity is the key, and many understand that.
“So what are you going to do—criminalize the homeless?” asked one resident as he was being swept out of an encampment in San Jose, California. “If you can work together to lock everybody up, why can’t you do it to get people into housing? All across the country, the way they’re dealing with encampments and homeless people is all the same. Think about what they’re doing in Gaza. Where’s the difference? …. Even if you give them something for a year, or six months, what have you done to change that situation, that they’re going to get back into again? …. I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff happen out here and I’ve seen a lot of beautiful things happen out here, people helping out, people going out of their way to do things. So I know that we can solve the problem.”
