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addiction
Want to Resist Trump? Treat the Homeless With Compassion
If you don’t want to acquiesce to the president’s way of doing things, might it not finally be time to make eye contact with those neighbors of ours who are homeless?
Sep 14, 2025
The federal takeover of Washington, DC rightfully attracted extensive media coverage, but an executive order called “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” quietly issued on July 24, received remarkably little attention. Perhaps it didn’t make a splash because it wasn’t specifically about policing (or, for that matter, National Guarding), but more generally about how we should treat people who already exist on the outermost fringes of society, human beings who have long been reduced to labels like “addict” or “homeless.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is counting on us to renounce those living on the streets, while struggling with their mental health or the cost of housing (or both). And if history is any guide, that may be exactly what most of us do. While the current moment may feel shocking in so many ways, the president’s order to end what he’s labeled “disorder” represents a further development of norms that have been in place for all too long. They are also norms that we have the power to change.
Identifying a very real crisis, the president’s July 24 executive order noted that “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 order went on to state that the majority of those who are unhoused have a substance use disorder, with two-thirds reporting that they have used hard drugs at some point in their lives. What followed was the administration’s solution: “Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings… will restore public order.” Precisely which institutions was unclear.
One thing we know is that the use of substances is often connected to past trauma or current hardship, including oppression and poverty. Regardless of that reality, not just the president but all too many of us tend to believe that people who use drugs are undeserving of our compassion or support. In 2021, a national survey found that 7 of every 10 Americans believed that those who use drugs problematically are “outcasts” or “non-community members.” (And yes, those were the terms used.)
The president’s executive order fuses drug use and homelessness into a single issue without revealing that homelessness can cause or exacerbate substance use disorder—because people use drugs to cope with privation. As addiction expert Gabor Maté has said, “Don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain.” Much like those of us who reach for wine or social media in order to escape, when people who are unhoused use drugs, they are usually searching for a way to make life tolerable. At the same time, they come to be regarded by their peers as non-community members, making it so much less likely that this nation will fight the president on his plans to round them up and erase them from our world entirely.
Meanwhile, many of us with homes never pause to consider our common habit of avoiding unhoused people in every possible way. We cross the street, shift our gaze, anything to avoid the briefest glimpse of their humanity—perhaps terrified to see ourselves in them. Here’s a thought, though: If you don’t want to acquiesce to the president’s way of doing things, might it not finally be time to make eye contact with those neighbors of ours who are homeless? Might it not be time to acknowledge their humanity and, in doing so, recover some of our own?
“Arbitrary and Prolonged Detention”
The Los Angeles nonprofit LA Más helps residents build security through collective economic power and home ownership. As Helen Leung, its executive director, put it recently: “Families who’ve been in their neighborhoods for generations are getting priced out. Vendors who work multiple jobs are sleeping in their cars. Kids have classroom friends disappear mid-semester because rent went up again.” She noted that immigrants and working-class households in particular are experiencing acute displacement pressure, which ultimately pushes some to become houseless—and now they find themselves in the crosshairs of the president’s July executive order.
That order proposes the vast expansion of a practice that has been around for a very long time. In recent years, in fact, in states across this country, there has been an uptick in involuntary commitment, a trade term for the forced institutionalization of people who are unwell—or, now, simply unhoused.
Evidence suggests that rounding up masses of unwell people and institutionalizing them will do anything but benefit public safety, while endangering the individuals who are locked up.
Elected officials of all political stripes, including the current president, have claimed that involuntary commitment is an evidence-based way to treat mental illnesses, including addiction. Research does show that, in certain cases, involuntary commitment can be beneficial. But in all too many cases, it’s both ineffective and inhumane. A recent report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that the institutionalization of individuals who were involuntarily hospitalized in “judgment call cases”—meaning cases where one physician might recommend hospitalization, while another would not—nearly doubled the risk of death by suicide or overdose. It also nearly doubled the likelihood of that person later being charged with a violent crime, perhaps because such institutionalization disrupted employment, subjecting people to still more dire economic circumstances. (Again, don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain.) Even a recent essay in the New York Times advocating forced treatment conceded that it must be well funded and thoughtfully carried out—conditions that are virtually certain to be unmet in the current climate.
In other words, evidence suggests that rounding up masses of unwell people and institutionalizing them will do anything but benefit public safety, while endangering the individuals who are locked up. On-the-ground data also indicates that, even before US President Donald Trump focused on that tactic, such commitment was unequally applied, with Black and Hispanic people more likely than White people to be institutionalized against their will.
“We’re not operating with an optimal treatment system, mandatory or voluntary,” according to Regina LaBelle, director of the Center on Addiction Policy at Georgetown University and the former acting director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. “We’re starting from a really bad system. And so pushing people into a really bad system will end really badly.”
In response to the president’s executive order, the American Bar Association published a statement saying that it raises grave constitutional and civil rights issues and “paves the way for arbitrary and prolonged detention.”
Housing Is a Human Right
A response to the president’s executive order, published in the Psychiatric Times, a journal for psychiatry professionals, noted that it “invokes fear of people with psychiatric illnesses, talks of indiscriminate incarceration of people who have not committed a crime, as well as collection and sharing of sensitive health information with law enforcement, and yet proposes no actual solutions.”
Unfortunately, the president and his crew undoubtedly do regard the involuntary commitment of unhoused people as an “actual solution.” Indeed, many people who have homes or apartments feel unhappy at the sight of human beings living on the streets of their neighborhood and want something done about it. But the underlying problem isn’t that people live on the street or use substances in public in order to tolerate despair. As Helen Leung put it, “When someone loses their housing, it’s not because they need to be institutionalized—it’s because we’ve allowed housing to become a commodity instead of a human right.”
“What works best is making sure that we have affordable housing for people,” says LaBelle. New research out of Philadelphia, for instance, found that a program of cash assistance for housing costs more than halved the odds of participants becoming homeless.
But our prevailing housing system—in which the purpose is less to provide shelter than to generate profits for those who own real estate—has resulted in rents or costs that are beyond reach for increasing numbers of Americans. And as if such a state of affairs weren’t bad enough, President Trump now plans to make “alternative” investment assets, including real estate, available to anyone with a 401(k). If he succeeds in doing so, far more people will compete to own real estate for the purposes of turning a profit, which will undoubtedly raise real estate prices yet more, driving rents higher still.
Notably, his July 24 executive order provides law enforcement with the vague instruction to institutionalize people who “cannot care for themselves,” which could result in a kind of real estate roulette. In essence, those who lack the cash to pay for housing at market rates—no matter how high those rates rise—could be deemed unable to care for themselves, and therefore would become eligible to be rounded up and taken… where?
Very Much Precedented
On one matter there is widespread agreement: There’s already a distinct shortage of mental health services, especially for those who can’t pay for them.
“Our current system does not provide for long-term institutionalization,” noted the Psychiatric Times in its response to the president’s executive order, which itself does nothing to expand the inpatient capacity of treatment facilities or increase funding for mental health services. The administration actually slashed funding for such programs this spring and has approved cuts to Medicaid, a program that currently funds 24% of all mental-health and substance-use care in the United States.
It’s easy to blame Trump, but far harder to engage in self-reflection: How have I participated in the dehumanization of unhoused people or those who use drugs?
So where will people be taken? Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has proposed rural camps for addiction recovery, but that (controversial) policy would require substantial new funding, rather than cuts, to healthcare. The president and Congress do seem to have an appetite for increasing funding for military and enforcement programs. The hastily constructed immigration detention facility in Florida known as “Alligator Alcatraz” offers a nightmarish example of how this administration pursues the development of new carceral space.
Already, immigrants are being rounded up and institutionalized, a practice likely to be expanded to still more of our neighbors. While all of this may feel unprecedented, it’s all too precedented. This nation has a long history of institutionalizing people who have not committed a crime, including Indigenous people and those with mental health struggles. It’s easy to blame Trump for all that’s now happening, and he certainly bears enormous responsibility, but he’s not responsible for everything.
He is not, for example, responsible for the longstanding and pervasive stigma attached to people who are unhoused or mentally unwell or both, which has pushed all too many of us in the wealthiest nation on Earth to live in isolation and poverty and even to perish. It’s easy to blame Trump, but far harder to engage in self-reflection: How have I participated in the dehumanization of unhoused people or those who use drugs? Do I have the capacity to recognize the humanity in everyone without exception?
ICE (Like Stigma) Now Operates in the Shadows
Perhaps it seems that acknowledging the humanity of those who have so long been dehumanized is far too little and too subtle to make a difference now. And it’s true that we need much more than that, including strong collective action to create housing that people can afford and that’s accessible to those who have experienced addiction and criminalization. But it’s also true that nonjudgmental support from peers makes a difference in the lives of those who are struggling, raising the odds that they may heal and go on to live fruitful and connected lives.
In the past half-year of Donald Trump’s second term as president, raids by masked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have become a fixture of American life. ICE now operates in the shadows—and that’s how stigma works, too. Stigma toward people who use drugs or who live without homes is a corrosive force that makes it acceptable to withhold compassion, care, and connection from certain of our neighbors. But unlike forces equipped with military-grade tactical gear, stigma can be overcome by any individual who chooses to witness and affirm the humanity of all our neighbors. And in our present American world, doing so is surely a revolutionary act.
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Trump’s New Substance Use Policy Would Have Made My Own Recovery Impossible
My daughter exists because someone gave me a hotel room, a hospital bed, and a second chance. If EO 14321 had been in place, I would have been treated like a criminal, not a patient.
Aug 30, 2025
Last month, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14321—“Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” By criminalizing homelessness, addiction, and mental health crises, the order strips federal support from lifesaving public health solutions like Housing First and harm reduction—the very policies that saved my life and my daughter’s, and made my nearly three years of recovery possible.
I spent over a decade unhoused in San Francisco. I was already used to instability—much of my childhood was spent living in cars, motels, and campgrounds, until I landed in foster care. They kept placing me in institutions, each more restrictive than the last. I ran away often. The threat of forced placements where abuse was common taught me early to value my freedom. But freedom, without any foundation, can come at the cost of survival. I used substances to manage trauma I had no tools to process. It wasn’t glamorous. I did what I had to do to survive.
By age 29, I was pregnant and living in a makeshift shelter beside the freeway with my partner. A massive storm hit and everything we had was washed away. We were soaked, freezing, and standing in knee-deep water when the city’s Homeless Outreach Team arrived. No judgment. Just one question: “Are you safe where you are right now?” They got us into a hotel that night. That simple act saved my life—and gave me a chance.
With shelter, I was able to schedule a prenatal appointment. When I missed it due to withdrawal symptoms, a public health nurse came to me and helped get me into a hospital bed to safely taper off opioids. I spent the rest of my pregnancy hospitalized due to complications. My daughter was born prematurely and spent two months in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. It was a long road, but we made it. That wouldn’t have been possible under Trump’s executive order.
If Trump chooses cages, we can choose clinics. If he chooses punishment, we can choose prevention. If he chooses fear, we must choose humanity.
EO 14321 eliminates federal support for Housing First policies—programs that provide housing without requiring sobriety. It prioritizes forced institutionalization over voluntary care. It defunds services like naloxone distribution, clean syringes, and mobile health teams that meet people where they are. It punishes cities like San Francisco for offering compassionate, evidence-based care.
After giving birth, I entered treatment, using methadone to taper slowly. I’ve been sober nearly three years. That wouldn’t have happened if I’d been forced to quit cold turkey. The first time I was pregnant, I did exactly that—thinking it was best for the baby. I got violently ill and miscarried. I didn’t know opioid withdrawal could be fatal during pregnancy.
That’s why harm reduction matters. When you’ve used for years, quitting all at once can kill you. I needed time, support, and nonjudgmental care. If someone had tried to force me into abstinence, I would’ve run. The only reason I could stay was because I was met with dignity, not demands.
Harm reduction tools—like clean syringes and naloxone—kept me and my partner alive long enough to heal. Narcan brought us back more than once. These aren’t fringe ideas. They’re public health basics. Without them, I wouldn’t be a mother today.
My daughter is 2 now—chubby, curious, thriving. I still receive medication-assisted treatment, not because I’m still using, but because my tolerance was high after years on the street. My partner is now in the sheet metal union. We have housing. We have hope. But under EO 14321, the very services that helped build this life would have been gone. The care I needed would’ve been criminalized.
Trump’s order doesn’t just shift funding—it reshapes the system around coercion. It calls for expanded civil commitment laws that make forced treatment easier. But science and lived experience say the same thing: Coercion kills, voluntary care heals. I was institutionalized for nearly a year at 16—not because I was violent, but because I was suffering. It didn’t help. It hurt. It made me distrustful and traumatized. If you strip away someone’s autonomy, you strip away their will to recover.
This order tries to legislate suffering. It replaces housing and support with jail cells, locked wards, and abstinence-only programs that don’t work for most people. It replaces hope with fear. But addiction doesn’t respond to punishment. Recovery grows in trust, safety, and connection.
So what does compassion look like in practice? Start with Housing First—always. Fund syringe access and safe-use spaces. Offer medication-assisted treatment without strings attached. Train outreach workers in trauma-informed care. Build trust. Respect autonomy. Celebrate survival instead of punishing it.
San Francisco has already shown it’s possible. Our city is on track to become the first major US city with no new HIV infections—precisely because we invested in harm reduction and met people where they were, without shame. As the federal government rolls back those strategies, we face a choice. Do we follow them down a path of fear and criminalization, or do we lead with evidence, compassion, and courage?
My daughter exists because someone gave me a hotel room, a hospital bed, and a second chance. If EO 14321 had been in place, I would have been treated like a criminal, not a patient. I might not be here. She definitely wouldn’t be. Until a person dies, there is hope. That hope is sacred. It’s not flashy. It takes time. But it works. If Trump chooses cages, we can choose clinics. If he chooses punishment, we can choose prevention. If he chooses fear, we must choose humanity. Let’s not squander the hope we still have.
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Why Trump Is Making Vagrancy Laws Great Again
Trump's new executive order on homelessness is not a departure from policy failure. It is the logical continuation of a governance model that confuses erasure with resolution.
Jul 25, 2025
There are words that live quietly in the margins of law, waiting for the right conditions to become instruments of control. Vagrancy is one of them. It does not name a crime so much as a condition—a presence deemed out of place, a body detached from property, purpose, or permission. It has always been a word that grants the state an elastic mandate: to sweep, to detain, to erase.
Its history is older than this country. In 14th-century England, following the Black Death, the ruling class faced a labor shortage that briefly shifted the balance of power toward the working poor. Rather than negotiate, they legislated. A series of statutes criminalized idleness and movement, branding those who wandered without employer or land as enemies of order. The offense was not what they did—it was that they could not be accounted for. Vagrancy became a pretext for containment, a tool to bind the body to power, and a signal that survival outside sanctioned structures would not be tolerated.
The word arrived in the Americas with that logic intact and found new utility in a country built on hierarchy and extraction. Across centuries, it was used to arrest freed Black men for walking without proof of employment, to justify the confinement of Indigenous people who had refused removal, to expel Chinese workers labeled as moral contagions, to target queer youth and disabled residents whose lives defied social norms. It appeared on signs and statutes alike, a vague but potent summons of disorder, always defined from above. It did not require action. It required only that someone be seen.
Now, the word has returned—not as metaphor or memory, but as mandate. On July 24, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets”—a sweeping directive that promises to fight “vagrancy” and reframes homelessness, addiction, and mental illness not as public health crises or systemic failures, but as threats to civic peace.
The order offers no new housing, no expanded care infrastructure, no commitment to addressing the material conditions that produce displacement. Instead, it offers a rubric for removal. Under its provisions, federal grants from Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Service, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Transportation will prioritize jurisdictions that criminalize public presence—cities that ban urban camping, prohibit loitering, penalize “urban squatting,” and track individuals deemed out of bounds. Programs that offer harm reduction, low-barrier shelters, or evidence-based treatment models face new restrictions or disqualification. Legal safeguards against involuntary psychiatric commitment are to be rolled back, consent decrees reversed, and behavioral nonconformity redefined as detainable.
Vagrancy persists because it works—not in reducing harm, but in reallocating blame. It shifts public anxiety about inequality, addiction, and disorder away from the systems that produce them and toward the individuals who cannot hide them.
This is not a departure from policy failure. It is the logical continuation of a governance model that confuses erasure with resolution. The language remains soft—beautification, humane treatment, restoration—but the infrastructure it supports is hard: surveillance in place of service, confinement in place of care, disappearance in place of dignity. It teaches agencies to measure success not by outcomes but by optics: How many tents are gone? How few bodies remain visible? How fully have we restored the image of control?
Vagrancy persists because it works—not in reducing harm, but in reallocating blame. It shifts public anxiety about inequality, addiction, and disorder away from the systems that produce them and toward the individuals who cannot hide them. It casts the existence of suffering as a provocation and conditions civic belonging on legibility, order, and stillness. In doing so, it grants governments a new kind of authority: the power not simply to punish what people do, but to penalize who they are when no performance is possible.
This order does not restore order. It reinstates a hierarchy of visibility. It tells those without shelter, treatment, or family that the problem is not what they lack—but that they can still be seen. And in doing so, it signals to the rest of us that our security lies in distance, that the absence of suffering from view is proof that it has been addressed. It invites the public to mistake silence for peace, stillness for stability, emptiness for care.
But the history of vagrancy tells a different story. It is a word that rises not in response to crisis, but in response to fear: the fear that the margins might speak, might move, might disrupt the fictions we tell about what this country is and who it serves. When the powerful feel that their order is slipping, they do not ask what has failed. They ask who can be removed.
If there is any hope in this moment, it lies in refusing the comfort of euphemism. This is not about restoration. It is about removal. Not about care, but control. Not about safety, but sightlines.
We do not have to accept the return of vagrancy into our political vocabulary. We can name it for what it is: a centuries-old code for managing the inconvenient poor, repackaged as policy. We can refuse to let language do the work of violence. And we can insist—still, again—that visibility is not disorder, and that survival, even unkempt, even unsanctioned, is not a threat to be eliminated.
It is a truth to be answered. With housing. With care. With courage. And with clarity
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