First They Came for the Homeless, Now the Students

People across the world are watching in horror as scenes of violent crackdowns on peaceful student protests reach the news and social media. Students protesting America’s role in Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians face police in riot gear wielding batons.

In Boston, as police closed in, Amina Adeyola, an Emerson College student organizer working with hundreds of protesters , made an impassioned speech urging the mayor to call off the city’s police. She highlighted that the city ordinance used by the police to arrest protesters was the same one first designed to remove unhoused people from a large encampment just months earlier.

Immediately after her speech, she was arrested. Scenes of Emerson students being dragged, body-slammed, belongings being torn from their hands, were live-streamed on social media. Students reported substantial injuries.

The student protesters implore us to see the interconnectedness of global freedom struggles against systemic oppression and authoritarian force.

As physicians caring for people experiencing homelessness in Boston, we are all too familiar with the anti-homeless ordinance used to arrest the students. The context was different, but the swift crackdown in the name of public health and safety was the same. We see haunting similarities in the use of expanded police power and the weaponization of public health and safety to criminalize dissent and control oppressed groups.

Just a few months earlier, facing a crisis of increasing homelessness and rising housing costs, Boston enacted the new ordinance banning tent camping throughout the city. The mayor called on the police to sweep encampments of homeless communities and to ticket and fine individuals for living outside. While the ordinance required that police first offer storage for belongings and a shelter bed, this seemed disingenuous. The largest shelters in Boston were already full, with people routinely sleeping on the floor.

We vociferously opposed the measure based both on personal experience and on evidence from encampments across the country. After prior sweeps, our patients who were receiving life-saving medications, including treatments for HIV and other serious infections, would disappear—whether in jail, pushed to a more distant encampment, or dead, we often did not know. Disturbing images from previous encampment removals were fresh in our minds: wheelchairs being confiscated and crushed, medications and other crucial belongings being forcibly taken from patients. Mounting public health research shows that law enforcement-led sweeps of homeless encampments do not bring health and safety. They do not result in less violence. They do not result in less drug use. They result in disconnection from life-saving harm reduction services and medical care. They result in more hospitalizations and fatal overdoses.

To hear city officials, including physicians, cite “health and safety” as the motivation for the ordinance was deeply unsettling. The well-being of the unhoused individuals who were ultimately arrested, or pushed into less visible parts of the city, was never the primary concern. Instead of investing the necessary money and time into tackling hard problems—lack of affordable housing, cycles of incarceration and poverty, inadequate addiction treatment—the city chose to expand police power against an already marginalized group.

Today we see this same ordinance wielded against students demanding divestment from Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In defending the police action, Mayor Michelle Wu cited the “health and safety” of Bostonians. The morning after the Emerson College protest crackdown, city workers cleaned up blood from the protest site. It’s difficult to square the sight of protesters’ blood on sidewalks resulting from police violence, with that call for health and safety. How could they do this?

As Adeyola astutely pointed out, we gave them the tools.

Rather than fund housing and other necessary services to prevent homelessness, our elected leaders use our tax dollars to fund police and prisons which are full of unhoused people. Rather than disclose and divest from Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide, university leaders invite police forces (often militarized by the Israeli Defense Force) onto campus in the name of student safety, to brutalize and arrest students and their faculty and community supporters.

The student protesters implore us to see the interconnectedness of global freedom struggles against systemic oppression and authoritarian force. They demand that we not shield our eyes from our leaders’ brutal disregard of Palestinian life in the false name of Israeli security. As medical providers, we have an obligation to speak out against the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s critical infrastructure and the mass murder of healthcare workers who are desperately trying to save civilian lives. As healthcare workers committed to the genuine health and well-being of all—whether unhoused people, student protesters, or the people of Gaza—we must denounce everywhere the use of state violence in the name of safety. And beyond rhetoric, we must protect and support those most vulnerable who speak out and demand a more just world. We cannot abandon our young people to risk everything alone. Healthcare workers must be by their sides, flooding every student encampment across the nation.

In these dark times for democracy, we as homeless medicine physicians witnessing attacks first on homeless people and now on protesting students, are reminded that our collective silence and inaction endangers us all.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller